Sometimes it’s the best way to get your point across. Not all arguments are worth of equal time. Many times my points get dismissed too. It happens.
I don’t really feel attacked, I’m just not going to respond to reflexive notions of bigotry. People use the word bigot far too often and it is starting to wear out.
Using the word bigot is dismissive in and of itself.
I recommend this to you as you clearly do not know what ad hominem means. Attacking someone’s argument is not an ad hominem. ad hominem means that you dismiss their argument by some virtue of their identity.
ad hominem: Your argument can’t be correct because you are a moron.
not ad hominem: You are an idiot because your argument is stupid.
I didn’t call you stupid, just your argument. No one offended me personally. I just felt like I would have to wade through a lot of canned arguments if I gave them any respect at all.
I’d like to remind you that your initial contribution was:
That’s sort of the canned argument that reduces the other side to ridiculousness. So you are asking for respect when you started off with disrespect. You decided that he was a prude (ad hominem) and therefore the rest was irrelevant.
Don’t start by denying something’s existance only to go on and describe what it is. Either something is or it isn’t. You started by denying it’s being and then proceeded to describe it as a state of being. Your post struck me as unconstructive double-talk.
Nipple rings are products, raves are culture. Culture as you and I both have defined it, is in terms of a process, a way of life.
Yes, we define all words for convenience. Again you aren’t saying anything, but you’re not saying it very eloquently.
Culture has to exist to change.
Ok, no disagreement here.
‘Wrong’ in this case is purely subjective. It’s not wrong if you don’t care, and it is wrong if you do care. If certain cultural forms require a critical mass of participation in order to continue then it is ‘wrong’ to those who want them to continue, not wrong to those who are ambivalent, and right to those who want to see it change.
The problem here is that this reaches far more fundamentally into the hierarchy of needs. IE, it touches on the survival of the culture itself. Chinese people playing Mozart are not preserving Austrian culture, they are Chinese people playing Mozart. It’s certainly not dangerous nonsense to point out that there are more people over 65 than there are under 15. Anyone who knows even the first thing about demographics and economics knows that this is an untenable situation, as the very basis for economics is that old people amass wealth, then distribute it to the young who perform the labor. If there is no young to perform the labor the wealth dissipates. The loss of cultural tradition cannot simply be replaced by immigrants, it doesn’t work like that because much of culture is passed on through family, especially if the culture does not have a tradition of assimilating immigrants.
I disagree with the fundamental premise that tradition is irrelevant.
The thread went just fine IMO. It made it to page 4 before it got hijacked. As far as I can tell that’s as well as one can hope for a thread to go.
Never said you did, but you did choose to oversimplify an argument into an ad hominem and now you are asking me to give it equal time. So if you are going to teach me good debating skills then what I have in return to help your debating skills is suggest that you not just toss in an oversimplifying stereotype as your first effort in the thread.
That’s because you didn’t read carefully. Others did, and they caught the nuance of what I was saying.
Your lack of nuanced reading is not my problem. Your aggressive defence of poor reading is also not my problem, but it’s clear that further talk with you is unproductive.
That’s correct. In our modern world of plenty where sex is being decoupled from reproduction, natural selection would seem to prefer groups who (1) hold the cultural value that it’s a good idea to have lots of children; and (2) are succesful in transmitting their culture to their young.
People at the extreme edges of religion seem to fit these requirements pretty well. Actually, there are some interesting parallels between the Amish and the Haredim. Basically, the way they talk, act, and dress raises significant cultural barriers between them and the outside world.
To be sure, trends can change. Just as Austria’s low birth rate may very well change.
Actually, none, based on his quoted comments linked in this thread. That has been the straw man of a number of posters.
Djerassi expressed concern for a declining birth rate in Austria and suggested that the solution would be to review immigration. Since capping or lowering immigration would not force up the birth rate, the clearest interpretation one could give to his words, (if not predisposed to presume xenophobia or in every current European), would be that he sees an increase of immigration as the necessary solution to an aging population. How support for an increase, presumably from Turkey, North Afrrica, and similar locations, would indicate racism is, of course, studiously ignored by those who need to find it.
This is not an obstacle from a post-modernist perspective. You’d understand this if you had enough respect for your forbearers to learn about our defining traditions, instead of dismissing them as “liberal navel-gazing.”
FWIW, I know you’re joking around, but I wanna clarify that what I’m saying doesn’t fall at all into the deconstructivist camp; rather, if it’s gonna be categorized, it’s an embarrassingly modern emphasis on the individual as the seat of all that’s interesting or relevant.
Referring to the article he wrote in December that is quoted in the OP’s link he said:
“Contraception, birth control, abortion, or the pill were nowhere mentioned in my article. I accused the disturbingly large xenophobic segment of Austrian voters (notably young ones) of assuming that their small country was not situated in the middle of Europe but rather on an island where God permits them to live independently to enjoy their schnitzels.”
Wait a second. How old do you think “towns built around automotive culture” are, anyway? The private automobile didn’t become the dominant element in American community structures until around the 1950’s. That’s only about 10-20 years before the advent of bell bottoms.
And where on earth do you get the idea that techno, a music genre less than 25 years old, ranks as some kind of abiding part of American culture?
Yes, there are differences between long-term cultural heritage and passing cultural fads, but I wouldn’t put money on any individual’s ability to reliably predict which recent trends are going to fall into which category.
I am talking about the differences between a product of culture like Bell Bottoms and a Cultural movement, like the hippies that wore the bell bottoms. Electronic music is here to stay, Techno has an enduring legacy and people organize their lives around it. While there is a fashion culture there is no bell bottoms culture.
Yes, I’d agree, they are kind of movements of contiguous threads in culture. Techno came out of Disco to a certain degree. Just like Beatniks gave way to hippies and somewhere along the line flappers gave way to whatever it was that gave way to Beatniks.