South Korea

[Ibrahim]

The current South Korean administration, Moon in particular, is what's really driving the progress here. The bonkers summit was just an excuse for Kim and Trump to back down on their bonkers rhetoric, and as such I consider it a huge success. Aside from that, Moon has negotiated some real joint enterprises with the North, and that's the kind of thing that will erode the Kim regime over time.

In broad terms the South is so obviously superior to the North in every category that it actually makes reunification more of a challenge and not less. It has to be handled with a level of respect for North Koreans than no other people on Earth are likely to possess. And some factions in South Korean politics have an attitude of dismissive contempt for North Koreans that would make even a North American redneck caricature blush.

[noddy]

some say south korea is barely changed from its previous semi feudal state and if you remove samsung and hyundai from the economy( and the families they represent ) you suspicously dont have much modernity left.

having said that, my household is pretty much totally sourced from those 2 companies and life would be worse without them

[Ibrahim]

I'm of the view that you can never go back to a traditional society, by definition. You can only create a third thing that's neither modern nor traditional, and the results we are seeing today of other groups that have tried to do so are pretty horrific.

But skillfully invoking their shared history and cultural traditions will be crucial in reunification. Even if the end result will be the entire peninsula's children squinting a Samsung phones all day.

[Simple Minded]

I'm of the view that you can never go back to a traditional society, by definition. You can only create a third thing that's neither modern nor traditional, and the results we are seeing today of other groups that have tried to do so are pretty horrific.

But skillfully invoking their shared history and cultural traditions will be crucial in reunification. Even if the end result will be the entire peninsula's children squinting a Samsung phones all day.

Excellent observation. As they say "You can never go home." Because neither you nor home are the same as either used to be.

I remain optimistic that ever more restrictive, and purer group identity labels will result in all of us fragmenting into and belonging to the all inclusive group of "Me, Myself, and I."

Modern tech will allow all the members of "Me, Myself, and I" to self-isolate and interact only through cyberspace thus achieving perpetual actual peace via continuous cyber flame throwing. Social Media are the perfect WMD's.

Even better than the neutron bomb. Cyber weapons that only slay your imaginary enemies and personal dragons are the key to human peace and happiness. Unlimited ammo and unlimited targets at no cost, with personal pride and bruised egos as the only casualties of war.

Who needs peace when cyber war produces no casualties? Hell, who would even want peace?

[noddy]

dead true you can never go backwards, only forwards.

I was mainly musing on what modernity actually is - how places like china or south korea just picked up agrarian populations and turned them into techno cities in a single generation and so many other places have attempted brainwashing via "modern education" for nearly a century now and havent shifted much at all.

would australia or canada still be modern without primary industry exports and land sales generating all that money for consumption ?
its not like all our fancy pants education results in many high tech industries or actual production of "modernity", it mostly produces malcontent arts students making fancy coffees.

modern is having money to buy toys, and shifting from macho aggressive to passive aggressive, im not sure it is much else.

[Doc]

West Germany VS East Germany. Seems to me like there is still a big difference between the two thirty years after the reunification.

[Ibrahim]

West Germany VS East Germany. Seems to me like there is still a big difference between the two thirty years after the reunification.

There is a difference, but less than there was in 1988.

dead true you can never go backwards, only forwards.

I was mainly musing on what modernity actually is - how places like china or south korea just picked up agrarian populations and turned them into techno cities in a single generation and so many other places have attempted brainwashing via "modern education" for nearly a century now and havent shifted much at all.

would australia or canada still be modern without primary industry exports and land sales generating all that money for consumption ?
its not like all our fancy pants education results in many high tech industries or actual production of "modernity", it mostly produces malcontent arts students making fancy coffees.

modern is having money to buy toys, and shifting from macho aggressive to passive aggressive, im not sure it is much else.

A pair of urbanites fighting over a downtown parking spot can show off more "macho aggression" than most ancient Korean villagers. Its hard to generalize about contemporary or traditional culture, and most of the town vs. country comparisons made in Western media tend to be made by hyper-urban political and media figures, and consumed by the aging suburbanites who actually watch cable news.

We count generations forwards from WW2 and the boomers, which isn't the worst idea but I think that technological changes count for more than the actual cohort you were born into. A professional in Seoul today nearing the end of his career may well have grown up in a home with a dirt floor, his son might have heard stories about village life be he grew up in the town, and his grandson only knows the Internet.

The sad thing - depending on who you talk to - is that the technology always wins out. People in North Korea can see via banned but widely spread media how people in the South live, and that's how they want to live too. Just like our own populations made the choice to embrace the modern world, even as we complain about it. But we complain about it online.

Koreans have a particularly strong sense of their history, its something that the people living in the North and South have in common, even though their present day lives are so different. The end result for everybody is "modernity," every culture has to decide what to throw away and what to keep as they enter into it.

Modernity itself is constantly in flux, almost impossible to define in such a way they someone couldn't raise plenty of reasonable objections and counterexamples. Its a "you know it when you see it" type of thing, and it looks like Seoul, or New York, or London, or, in our smaller nations, Sydney or Toronto.

[Simple Minded]

Very well said Ibrahim. One of the reasons I find the concept of group identity, and the obsession with group identity of the past 15 year or so, so very entertaining. In any population above say 5,000, there is so much variation, that attempts to define the group mostly consist of the projections of the observer.

But, "experts" love to argue about the defining characteristics of "us" and "them." Large populations both encourage and defy stereotyping.

"We" are virtuous and open minded. "They" aren't. Just ask one of "us" or one of "them" if you have any doubts.

[Ibrahim]

This reminds me of a medieval European/Islamic take on Platonism. (Not my specialty so I may be mangling this). Everything has matter and form, but it can have a number of forms simultaneously and in succession. Its sort of the same thing for citizens, who belong first to their family, then their village or neighbourhood, then their region within the state, then their state, and then their nation state, and so on. All at once.

So two people from a locality could talk for hours about the peculiar and alien ways of the people one town over, but you will also nearly run towards the sound of any English being spoken when you've spent several months in an industrial city in mainland China, and talk for hours with a salesman from Delaware because, hey, at least you can understand each other.

Koreans are only missing one layer of this, the topmost layer, which is also the most abstract. But there is a kind of Platonic reality to it. North Korea and South Korea becoming Korea makes more sense on a gut level than, say, Mexico and the US and Canada merging into the Amero superstate.

[Simple Minded]

This reminds me of a medieval European/Islamic take on Platonism. (Not my specialty so I may be mangling this). Everything has matter and form, but it can have a number of forms simultaneously and in succession. Its sort of the same thing for citizens, who belong first to their family, then their village or neighbourhood, then their region within the state, then their state, and then their nation state, and so on. All at once.

So two people from a locality could talk for hours about the peculiar and alien ways of the people one town over, but you will also nearly run towards the sound of any English being spoken when you've spent several months in an industrial city in mainland China, and talk for hours with a salesman from Delaware because, hey, at least you can understand each other.

Koreans are only missing one layer of this, the topmost layer, which is also the most abstract. But there is a kind of Platonic reality to it. North Korea and South Korea becoming Korea makes more sense on a gut level than, say, Mexico and the US and Canada merging into the Amero superstate.

agreed. The smaller the population sample, the more probable the success of integration into a homogenous "we." Some aspects of humanity transcend time and location

IMSMO, that is the interesting aspect of the recent group identity religious movements. At any given instant, the individual has a dozens of individual identity or group identity hats they can pick up and wear at a moment's notice. We all do it, and we all wear the one that seems to give us the greatest strategic benefit at the time.

Self-identification rocks!

[Nonc Hilaire]

This reminds me of a medieval European/Islamic take on Platonism. (Not my specialty so I may be mangling this). Everything has matter and form, but it can have a number of forms simultaneously and in succession. Its sort of the same thing for citizens, who belong first to their family, then their village or neighbourhood, then their region within the state, then their state, and then their nation state, and so on. All at once.

So two people from a locality could talk for hours about the peculiar and alien ways of the people one town over, but you will also nearly run towards the sound of any English being spoken when you've spent several months in an industrial city in mainland China, and talk for hours with a salesman from Delaware because, hey, at least you can understand each other.

Koreans are only missing one layer of this, the topmost layer, which is also the most abstract. But there is a kind of Platonic reality to it. North Korea and South Korea becoming Korea makes more sense on a gut level than, say, Mexico and the US and Canada merging into the Amero superstate.

agreed. The smaller the population sample, the more probable the success of integration into a homogenous "we." Some aspects of humanity transcend time and location

IMSMO, that is the interesting aspect of the recent group identity religious movements. At any given instant, the individual has a dozens of individual identity or group identity hats they can pick up and wear at a moment's notice. We all do it, and we all wear the one that seems to give us the greatest strategic benefit at the time.

Self-identification rocks!

Not quite with you, SM. The one thing religious identification and congregational worship has always provided has been a ladder giving the lower classes upward mobility.

[Simple Minded]

This reminds me of a medieval European/Islamic take on Platonism. (Not my specialty so I may be mangling this). Everything has matter and form, but it can have a number of forms simultaneously and in succession. Its sort of the same thing for citizens, who belong first to their family, then their village or neighbourhood, then their region within the state, then their state, and then their nation state, and so on. All at once.

So two people from a locality could talk for hours about the peculiar and alien ways of the people one town over, but you will also nearly run towards the sound of any English being spoken when you've spent several months in an industrial city in mainland China, and talk for hours with a salesman from Delaware because, hey, at least you can understand each other.

Koreans are only missing one layer of this, the topmost layer, which is also the most abstract. But there is a kind of Platonic reality to it. North Korea and South Korea becoming Korea makes more sense on a gut level than, say, Mexico and the US and Canada merging into the Amero superstate.

agreed. The smaller the population sample, the more probable the success of integration into a homogenous "we." Some aspects of humanity transcend time and location

IMSMO, that is the interesting aspect of the recent group identity religious movements. At any given instant, the individual has a dozens of individual identity or group identity hats they can pick up and wear at a moment's notice. We all do it, and we all wear the one that seems to give us the greatest strategic benefit at the time.

Self-identification rocks!

Not quite with you, SM. The one thing religious identification and congregational worship has always provided has been a ladder giving the lower classes upward mobility.

Me thinks you are with me more than you realize. Fred's religious affiliation and his congregation membership is additional identities he is free to choose, when it suits his needs. I would bet none belong to churches in which they find no benefit, unless membership in enforced via force.

I think the misunderstanding is I was referring to the "group identity" movements as new religions, not religions as group identity movements. But of course one's religion is yet another way one defines oneself.

[noddy]

from the outside Japan is the same genetic stock with 90% of the same cultural heritage too , so im not sure all that is quite as obvious as it might be.

nevermind east/west germany , what splits the dutchies from the germans ?

I only say that to be contrary, I have zero idea just how much a couple of generations of repressive brainwashing in a nasty regime vs an explosion of progress and social change causes irreparable splits.

a possible outcome is north korea rejoining but becoming a ghetto of folks looked down upon like "trash" from the richer, more educated south.. that story plays out all across the planet.

I believe China has that playing out internally at the moment, the rural peasants being a different grade of human to the middle class urbanites.

https://theconversation.com/outdated-ur ... zens-69920

[Simple Minded]

from the outside Japan is the same genetic stock with 90% of the same cultural heritage too , so im not sure all that is quite as obvious as it might be.

nevermind east/west germany , what splits the dutchies from the germans ?

I only say that to be contrary, I have zero idea just how much a couple of generations of repressive brainwashing in a nasty regime vs an explosion of progress and social change causes irreparable splits.

a possible outcome is north korea rejoining but becoming a ghetto of folks looked down upon like "trash" from the richer, more educated south.. that story plays out all across the planet.

I believe China has that playing out internally at the moment, the rural peasants being a different grade of human to the middle class urbanites.

https://theconversation.com/outdated-ur ... zens-69920

I always thought that hukou was a 3 line poem with 17 syllables.

Fascinating. Even more forms of group identity exist and methods of classifying people than I was aware of.

What did the author mean by this: A number of municipalities have introduced an Australian-style, points-based system, which means applicants who meet certain criteria become eligible for urban hukou.

do you guys have some official methods of assigning status?

[noddy]

http://www.visabureau.com/australia/imm ... -test.aspx

more money, more points.
more education, more points.
more demand for your skillset, more points.
someone inviting you in to work in a specific job, more points.

this is how we prioritise/filter the immigration lists.

australia (and canada) only have 2 industries - selling raw materials and selling overpriced houses to rich folks running away from the home country.

[Simple Minded]

http://www.visabureau.com/australia/imm ... -test.aspx

more money, more points.
more education, more points.
more demand for your skillset, more points.
someone inviting you in to work in a specific job, more points.

this is how we prioritise/filter the immigration lists.

australia (and canada) only have 2 industries - selling raw materials and selling overpriced houses to rich folks running away from the home country.

makes sense to me. this shows that both sides in DC have vested interests that are contrary to fixing the decades old mess of US immigration law.

Adopt Aussie, Swiss, Canadian or Japanese immigration law tomorrow, and the problem is solved. No one would dare call any of the above nations racist. That would be insensitive or Amero-centric.

[noddy]

theguardian would run out of articles if they stopped ranting on Australian racism.

its a fact of life that anytime a place gets a politician from the right wing side of the aisle then their plenty of talking heads on the inherit racism of the place - it backs off when the lefties are elected.

the only amusing bit is the immigration policies remain the same no matter who is in charge, so its best not to overthink it.

[Simple Minded]

the only amusing bit is the immigration policies remain the same no matter who is in charge, so its best not to overthink it.

True enough. The primary battle cry of both sides is "The other side is always stopping my side from fixing things." At least over here.

"If only "we" had more time, money, power, and a larger majority, man oh man, we could do some glorious shite!"

Its a lot more fun to perennially yell "They suck!" than to actually focus on problems solving and actual administration.

[Zack Morris]

South Korea in demographic crisis as many stop having babies

So much for Goldman's thesis that Abrahamic religiosity can save fertility. I recall him pushing a bizarre theory for years that Christianity in China was much larger than officially acknowledged and that this would lead to cultural rejuvenation. South Korea is what, 30% Christian? In particular, many of these are of the fanatical American Protestant strain. But it hasn't helped and religiosity is collapsing, too. So much for the theory that religious values are self-propagating and can lead to a positive feedback loop.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

I think a certain aversion to adulthood may have as much to do with it as well.....'>......