raakaa
2d ago
It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans.
Putting aside the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment [1] [2], I don’t think that we can conclude that the immigration of these groups (which have indeed assimilated) has not had a huge impact on the American republic. One good piece of evidence that I’ve seen for this is a blogpost that analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants. Something along the lines of “the rightmost Italian-American Republicans have views on fiscal policy to the left of the median American Democrat.” Assuming that these conclusions are true [3], if immigration really does significantly impact the long-term political fabric of America, then it’s hard to just brush off the effects of immigration as changes to mere “superficial elements” of the culture, as you put it.
Beyond those specifics, I think you’re being too dismissive of the desire to not see drastic changes in the political and cultural makeup of one’s country. I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure, would you be happy if America instantly imported 10 million of the most hardcore traditionalist Afghanis? A way more extreme way of putting it: would you be happy if the number of red-tribe MAGA lunatics [insert further epithets here] suddenly tripled?
I would be surprised if you answered “yeah I’d be cool with that.” Now, if your argument is rather something like “those numbers are too large to be reasonable; realistically, we would be better able to assimilate the number of immigrants that are actually on the table in the real world”, then that makes more sense, but at this point, we’re just “haggling over the price”, as the old joke goes.
[1] For example, check out the political cartoon at the top of the Wikipedia page for “Hyphenated American”, calling American immigrants who retained their ancestral identities “freaks” and implying that they shouldn’t vote. In modern times, this sentiment would be relegated to the loony wingnut cartoons your grandma would send you, but at the time, that cartoon was published in Puck, a respected New York political cartoon magazine (ironically founded by an immigrant).
[2] Notably, Germans were assimilated in a mass ethnolysis in the 1910s and 1940s, for obvious reasons.
[3] And I sadly can’t seem to find this blogpost despite throwing all the search terms I can think of at Google. If anyone reading this can remind me of it, even if to debunk it (or especially if!), then I’d be really grateful.
raakaa
3d ago
I’m gonna take the cowardly way out and reduce everything to language games. More specifically: for the term “anime fan” to be useful, it should tell you a lot about the kind of person whom that term describes, people who refer to themselves as “anime fans” should be able to have qualitatively different conversations among themselves than people who don’t, etc.
For some concrete scenarios:
- Alice has only watched Cowboy Bebop and Dragon Ball Z. She says “I don’t watch that icky stuff for weebs; I just like good stories.” Alice is probably not an anime fan.
- Bob watches every series that comes out each season, even if most of it is garbage. He discusses them online (even if most of that “discussion” consists of sharing screenshots of the girls in each series), rates them, etc. Bob is probably an anime fan.
- Carl is into film and television, and this interest in moving pictures extends to some anime. He knows about certain famous auteur directors (e.g. Yuasa, Satoshi Kon) and is able to talk deeply about the technical and artistic merits of Perfect Blue. But he doesn’t necessarily partake in the broader subculture as an activity distinct from how he’d discuss French New Wave films. Carl might not be an anime fan, although it’s harder to say, and it certainly does seem that he has a greater “appreciation for the medium” than Bob.
- Dennis doesn’t watch any anime. He doesn’t read manga either. He does watch YouTube videos posted by e-celebs summarizing or reacting to the latest flavor of the month series, he scrolls through /r/animememes, and he likes erotic fanart of anime characters on Twitter. Yet somehow, this almost makes me inclined to call him an anime fan, since even though he doesn’t actually watch any anime, he does partake in the culture surrounding it. (The word Ive seen people use to describe people like Bob is “secondaries”, that is, secondary fans.)
The common thread here is that at the end of the day, deciding to call yourself or someone else an “anime fan” is inherently a social act. If other people weren’t involved, then there would be no need to raise this question of identity: you could just watch some amount of anime on your own, in addition to whatever else you do during your time, without attaching a label to it. What this means is that if you are going to go to the trouble of applying the term “anime fan”, then the criteria for application should necessarily have to do with how to categorize groups of people.
raakaa
5d ago
But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but isn’t that just the entire field of literary criticism? A reader who isn’t perceptive enough or doesn’t put enough thought into what they read won’t be able to fully uncover all of the implications of what was written on the page. For a non-academic example, consider the painstaking work that Gwern put in in order to show that a certain enigmatic short story by Gene Wolfe is actually about
raakaa
24d ago
From what I understand, that explanation isn’t accurate. The more accurate one is that most men reproduced—but occasionally, one tribe would fully exterminate another tribe’s males, meaning that the loser tribe’s men from previous generations would have no contribution to present-day Y-chromosomal DNA. Despite this, those men did reproduce; it’s just that wars of extermination prevented their genes from making it all the way down to the present day.
But I’m not a hundred percent sure on this, so do let me know if I’m forgetting something myself.
The definition of knowledge is still a tricky thing, but even going by the naive Theaetetus-Gettier definition of “true justified belief”, it can be argued that merely saying “the world is gonna end in an hour!” doesn’t amount to actually believing it, and in any case, there doesn’t seem to be any justification. So if we assume that God uses that definition of knowledge, we can conclude that He would not consider you to “know” that the world is about to end, and there would thus be no contradiction in his ending it.
More options
Context Copy link