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A comment on South Korea: The only middle power of its kind. Parent comment

Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by tuatoru on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @04:52PM (#28054026)
> even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption.

The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations.

Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.

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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by oblio on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @06:03PM (#28054797)
The thing is, many countries have cultures based on opposition. There's a reason most national days are celebrations of an independence war.

So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.

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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by int_19h on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @07:46PM (#28055662)
It's long overdue for humanity to ditch the dangerous baggage that is Romantic nationalism.
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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by oblio on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:32AM (#28057891)
Good luck with that!

We're also not great at scaling trust.

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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by int_19h on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @12:58PM (#28063395)
Well, it's a relatively recent invention, historically speaking, so I'm optimistic. And we already have some emerging polities that recognize its problems, e.g.:

"We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept"

(https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...)

And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.

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