I’ve been trying to understand what makes the Anglosphere so different from the rest of the world that it has taken such an independent (even from reality sometimes) approach to the news cycle.

Something about English culture.

We all (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have versions of freedom of the press and a loyalty to classical liberalism that has given rise to so many different kinds of media voices. We are pampered by our unique material prosperity, and over the last few centuries we lived in relative ease and luxury compared to everyone else and have options about what to listen to.

Or maybe, as white quality of life declines in all these countries for the first time in centuries, and as corporations have monopolized their media landscape, we don’t know what to believe anymore from so many years of ease and comfort and bullshit and the lack of any need to think about anything else.

It all goes back to how living on an island primed the white English-speaking mind to think of itself as apart from everyone else, a world of its own where the goings-on of the rest of humanity are like something we hear about in faraway lands. White anglophones tend to be monoglots. We have a culture that has always been isolationist. It just ran away with itself once a bunch of Anglophones had a whole continent to wag at their mother island, but it was still a uniquely English attitude that started calling itself American. Think of the most backwards America stereotype you can: that mindset is basically the isolationist attitude of an island close to a continent that found a bigger continent and rebelled against the island the way the island likes to rebel against its neighboring continent.

Empires have historically had to do with controlling trade routes. Mesopotamia is where the first empires were born, because it was the center of all land-based trade. But circa 1,500 years after Christ, the Western European powers found technological ways to bypass the drama of the Mediterranean world and the Mesopotamian world by sailing around Africa to get to the East Indies. In process, we as old worlders just happened to discover the New World and be in a position to monopolize its exploitation and colonization. The economic boom and expire expansion easily put the West ahead of everybody else technologically, and so economically and militarily, and thus politically made them the center the of the world even though Europe has usually been a backwater since the last ice age ended.

Ideas of white supremacy isolated the European mind from the needs of anyone else as European powers squabbled over power like they always had since time immemorial, only the age of exploration and the economic boom and scientific revolution that followed made our bullshit the rest of the world’s problem. But culture between Europeans remained relatively the same as it always had, only with increasingly advancing technologies and the resources of vast empires behind the same monarchies.

Great Britain is an island that does not like to be invaded, because it often has been conquered. The Celtic tribes that lived here did not like the Roman conquest. The Romano Britain’s did not like the invasions of the Saxons, angles, and shoots. And the so-called Anglo-Saxons did not like the incursion of the Danes. And later, the English did not like the conquest of the norm in French. And once England could dish it back out, they went back down to the continent and took the fight to France. A genius linguist named gnome Chomsky proved that there is a universal language of the mind, so to speak, that is built in to the way that Anglophones think. Or another words English speakers have a certain way of thinking that is different from anybody else. Our minds are cultured by the language that we speak, which is cultured by our political surroundings which are infected by our environmental surroundings. Suffice it to say, the white Anglophonic world is just unique.

Take that culture and language and give it a vast empire the likes of which the world is never seen. The sun never sets on this empire. It has issues with 13 of its colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America, but those colonies become independent states and flourish into a power that rivaled their mother lands in time, and then time put them in a position where as the British empire was crumbling American power could pick up the slack and more or less keep the same world order going. The post World War II world order is basically the same European dominated world order as the last five centuries, only under management of the Yankees.

OK, now I’m going to share some random thoughts about war of the worlds by HG Wells. HG Wells was the father of modern science fiction, or one of its chief influencers at least. He believed in Darwinian evolution at a time when most people Scoffed at it. Is forward thinking short stories and novels were on Kenley on the money in many ways, so he came to influence a lot of things that happened in the 20th century. In 1937, for example, there was another man named Orson Welles who adapted the novel of HG Wells into a radio script to play over the radio. This was in an era where radio was TV. Or maybe today we would say YouTube. Radio was the YouTube of 1937. He performed it well, and it took the form of a mock breaking news reel. A lot of people believed it, and while news reports of people jumping off buildings because they didn’t wanna be killed by the Martians were over exaggerated, there were many people who later reported to have seen the Martians with their own eyes. These accounts seem to have colored the anecdotes about UFO abduction that came later in the 20th century. I saw a graphic on social media that showed the frequency of UFO sightings in anecdotes an alien abductions, and it seems like most of them occurred within America and the UK into a lesser extent Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. And got me thinking about what makes the Anglophonic world so different from everybody else. Wealth and privilege, for sure. But we also tend to live in free-speech societies where media companies compete for attention. This is always been true, it’s just more exaggerated now than it’s ever been. There must also be something about how that English isolationist mindset encountered manifest destiny and came to think of itself is not just the center of the whole world, but the whole world. Or fascinated about being visited by extraterrestrial strangers, for some reason we always imagined them taking a unique interest in us. There’s a quote from the first Captain America movie where the red skull tells Steve Rogers, “arrogance is not a uniquely American trait, but I must say you do it better than anyone.“ Maybe we could reform that quote to say that egocentrism is not a uniquely American trait, or a uniquely Anglophonic trait either, but maybe we do it better than anyone. The locus of anybody’s perception of the world is the point in space right behind their eyeballs, but still. Anglophones take it above and beyond.

Which gets to some thoughts about neoliberalism I keep having. Neo liberalism is a refutation of both Keynesian economics and new deal welfare state thinking in favor of a fresh tank on classic laissez-faire capitalism. Neo, meaning new. The new liberalism is a refutation of the old liberalism. The old liberalism was a liberation of the human being from the constraints of poverty, whereas the new liberalism is the liberation of capital from the constraints of regulation and taxation, especially regulations and taxation‘s which try to curb extreme wealth inequality in order to help the material needs of human beings. Neoliberalism has thrived in the era of globalized capitalism and digital banking. A little too well, actually. Brexit happened, because British jobs have been disappearing. Some of that is automation, but some of that is outsourcing, and of course the English mind would blame the continent for its struggles. The British equivalent of the rust belt is northern England where are you will see many tales of empty factory towns and white people killing themselves with drugs. If anyone wants to know why Brexit happen, those were the swing voters. And we should’ve seen that coming here too. Trumpism was the American Brexit, and it happened for almost all of the same reasons, just dialed up to 11 in a classic American way. England is an island that hates a continent. America is a continent that hates an island. But when both of them realize that they are isolationist together, they gravitate back towards each other In common hatred of the non-Anglophonic world.

All were living through our forces of human culture and human language that naturally developed from their surroundings. Before Stephen Hawking died, one of the last things he said was that people wouldn’t like it if they realize that we live in a fatalistic universe where there is no free will. That’s not to say that moral introspection doesn’t influence your behavior, but it does mean that we live in a universe where humans are part of the same physics equation as everything else. If you knew the state of a system, you could describe with mathematical precision how it would behave next. And we are finding that this is true in the age of big data and AI algorithms designed to hack our brains and influence how we vote. So many of the things happening are more complex and connected to history and beyond our understanding than we ever could’ve controlled for. You can’t control all the things that make human culture do what it does. You can try, but societies that have done that have found themselves politically and economically isolated and morally retarded. China is a great example of that. Human empires gobble up the cultures around them, but then generations pass and if situations are stable, and it just becomes a way of life for both the original conquering culture and all of their new vassal citizens.

Anglophonic culture was not going to dominate the world forever and remain untouched by cosmopolitanism. It just wasn’t. There’s something deeply isolationist buried in our language and therefore buried in how our brains are wired, but it was born to be disappointed. England is on an island apart from a continent, but that also put it in a position to be a uniquely strong naval power, which put it in a position to become the empire upon which the sun never sets. And all of its colonies and satellite nations inherited that cultural DNA. We both want to be left alone and dominate the earth at the same time. Well, not so much dominate it as we just like to think that we’re the only ones here. Maybe this cultural attitude when it intersects with race is white white supremacy is fundamentally.

I suppose other European colonial powers were also white supremacists, but those flavors of white supremacy took different forms. The Spanish, for example, are on a peninsula hanging off the ass end of Europe bordering with the Islamic world in Africa. For about 3/4 of a millennium, half of Spain was Muslim. For so many years, no one thought there was anything west of Spain all the way to China except a vast ocean so large no one could ever build a functional ship that could stick enough provisions and make the journey on wind power before the crew died of starvation. Christopher Columbus had the colossally wrong idea that the earth was smaller than previously thought. The Christian/Catholic element of Spain successfully drove out both the Muslims and the Jews and united the country under Catholicism the same year that Columbus came to the King and Queen of Castile. He discovered the New World on behalf of the European consciousness, and what happened next was a mixture of Christian moral supremacy over pagans meets race meets a comfort with cultural and genetic mixing that England frankly never had. The Spanish paradigm that reconquered Spain for Christ (la reconquista) is the same paradigm that was emboldened by the idea that the world was larger than anyone ever thought and Hispanic Christians were the ones to discover it because God hates pagans (los conquistadores). So we learn about the brutality of Cortez and Pizarro and the brutality of the Spanish colonial era on the indigenous and the mestizos. It’s a form of white supremacy, but it’s different from what the Anglos would inflict on the tribes north of the Rio Grande River.

Anglo-American white supremacy was different. It was tinged by that old English island isolationist cultural DNA, which is maybe why English white supremacy is so different from Spanish white supremacy. But we feel that cultural distinction here in the States as more and more immigrants come to us from MesoAmerica. I challenge anyone who hasn’t to make a first or second generation immigrant Latino friend and build the relationship to a point where you can talk about religion and have cultural exchanges. It’s fascinating. I learned Spanish in High School — I’m not fluent, but it’s far more than your average Anglo bothers to pick up — because I fully expected to serve my Mormon mission to the Lamanites. I remember the thoughts I had as a freshman getting used to the atmosphere of a Spanish class. I had all the social awkwardness and quietness I ever had, but I was also Mormon. Around other white kids, I felt like the persecuted minority, but there in an Arizonan Spanish class surrounded by bilingual chicanos just doing this for an easy, I was smitten for the first time with feelings of guilt for being part of an oppressor culture, or at least a far more privileged and easy-going culture. The Mexican people were formed from the collision of colonial Spain and the slaughter and rape of the indigenous, not England. But America did as soon as it could steal half of their territory in a humiliating defeat and treat them like a backwater ever since. NAFTA is sharing some of the wealth finally, but the same neoliberal conditions that have driven the rust belts and small towns in both the UK and USA to rebel against their perceived elites and oppressors have also driven hundreds of thousands of migrants from Mexico and beyond to seek work in the USA, which is of course interpreted through that monoglot Anglophonic suspicion of outsiders as a threat. But they’re not a threat. They’re just the brown, Spanish-speaking version of the people in Ohio killing themselves with fentanyl. If white anglophones didn’t perceive themselves as the top of the world or as the whole world, maybe they would migrate elsewhere for work just like these Laintos. But culture is what it is, and poverty here in America is still light years ahead of other countries even if it still sucks. But the situation is deteriorating nonetheless for white people, and they’re blaming the newcomers and the foreign influences on our government and the corrupt liberal culture that is getting away from what the great white blue-eyes King James English-speaking God intended.

These are all curious things, and I’m not going to stop thinking about them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2021 05:33PM by Cold-Dodger.

I remember once giving directions to an immigrant student (from Central America) in Spanish, and being told, "That won't work with her." Thus came my rather intensive introduction to Central and South American indigenous people and their multitude of languages. I've been told that the indigenous are about half of Central and South America - I don't know how accurate that is. I've also been told that if their parents have been lucky, then they got some formal schooling which is conducted in Spanish.

They are good people. They work hard and do a good job raising their kids. They are some of the best students that I've ever taught.

It doesn't escape my notice that a number of the indigenous are descendants of some of the greatest civilizations this world has ever known -- the Maya and the Aztecs. There's a lesson in there somewhere. There may come a time in the distant future when immigration flows southward. A civilization that rises can also fall precipitously. As Americans, we are rather full of ourselves.

Brilliant.

Rome once talked about what made it superior to everyone else; China did, and does now; France did it; Iran as well; Germany at the turn of the last century and again in the 1930s. Everyone thinks, in the moment of their ascendance, that they are the greatest civilization the world has ever seen.

Turn the page.

If you have to talk about it a lot perhaps you are not and never were. At least that was the essence of how I was brought up. The map with all the British red spread across it on the classroom wall was a reminder more than an advertisement.

Perhaps that explains why so much of the discussion on RfM is about Western, and particularly American, cultural and institutional superiority.

Perhaps my mother put it in simpler terms: act as if you have been there before.

Civilization first rose in 4 places we were taught in my history class at BYUI. The teacher almost immediately said, well, Central America and South America too, but those don’t count because they were utterly destroyed and absorbed into Spanish culture. So, 6, then. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China besides mesoAmerica and the Inca. Latinos have customs unique to their origins besides catholic Hispanic culture. It’s not correct to say that the civilizations which arose in the Western Hemisphere never affected anything that came after. We know next to nothing about the IVC.

The indigenous Americans are part of the same story of the peoples who left Africa. The ancestors of the Inca in particular wandered as far from their ancient origins in east Africa as it is possible to go. All on foot. And they built a thriving empire in an arid desert with complex irrigation agriculture and art that can be seen from space. Mormons thought they saw a white hand in the ruins of the Americas, and it was their little secret to boast about. But these people were never Caucasian or even fair skinned like Europeans and yet they built on that on the other side of the world independent of any “Old World” influences.

One of the things you need to keep in mind is that at least many of those whose trace their ancestry to medieval Spain and Portugal are descendants of Spaniards and Portuguese (from the 1400s to the 1800s) who were Jews, who were subsequently forced, by the government of Spain, to convert to Catholicism.

These people are today known by several different group names: Conversos, Anusim, and Marranos (marrano means "pig" in Spanish) are the most well known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Kfp2-Lqh4

In recent decades, it has become more or less taken for granted that Columbus was likely himself Jewish (he was extremely protective of his crew, likely all of whom were legally subject to torture by the Inquisition and subsequent death by burning, if their religiously-oriented situation was ever made "public").

Whether or not Columbus himself was of Jewish ancestry (this is a matter of academic dispute), his crew certainly was--as were probably most of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists who later came to settle in the New World.

Once in the New World, many of these colonists migrated throughout the continent, and most especially to the area of what is now the U.S. state of New Mexico.

Today, new and unexpected medical knowledge has become incredibly important because we are now aware of an inherited disposition to a particularly serious and lethal kind of breast cancer among present-day descendants of Spanish colonial settlers (many of whom have died of this particular breast cancer, one of whom I once knew well).

With contemporary DNA tests, it is now fairly easy to identify not only those Americans who are of Spanish/Portuguese Jewish descent, but also those who carry that specific breast cancer marker.

Among Jews worldwide, it is estimated that descendants of Spanish and Portuguese medieval colonists ("anusim," "conversos," "marranos") now number in the millions, and because of the inherited breast cancer vulnerability, it is important for everyone with this ancestry to learn whether they carry this vulnerability or not.

The entire American Southwest (including the states of California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) is heavily Hispanic in ancestry, and--through the media: films, TV shows; books; music, food, etc.--has significantly influenced life and culture throughout much of the USA portion of North America.

My conclusion is: one of the reasons why the USA and the UK are so different is that the UK does not have the USA's huge Hispanic culture as a part of its own, British, culture.

In the USA today, you can buy a taco most anywhere you happen to find yourself, and there is very likely a Spanish language station on your local car radio and in your local TV line-up.

Five centuries on, this Hispanic heritage really does make a huge difference between the USA and the UK.

[EDITED TO ADD: There are nine U.S. states which contain community property law as part of their state legal codes.

Community property law comes from Spanish law, and says that property of any kind acquired during a marriage is 50%-50% the legal property of each spouse (colloquially: "The hand that stirs the soup pot is equal to the hand that creates the crops."). There are some exceptions as to what is considered community property--for instance: inherited property. Spouses can each, individually, inherit property 100%.).

The nine community property states in the United States are: Arizona; California; Idaho; Louisiana; Nevada; New Mexico; Texas; Washington (state); Wisconsin.]



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 10/04/2021 02:14PM by Tevai.

Plus, not all Americans are of Anglo or primarily Anglo ancestry. It's become fashionable to think of Caucasians as having a cohesive culture, when in reality we are a mash of cultures -- Italian, German, Irish, Russian, etc. My dad's family's Anglo culture is very different from my mom's family's Polish and Russian culture.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Plus, not all Americans are of Anglo or primarily
> Anglo ancestry. It's become fashionable to think
> of Caucasians as having a cohesive culture, when
> in reality we are a mash of cultures -- Italian,
> German, Irish, Russian, etc. My dad's family's
> Anglo culture is very different from my mom's
> family's Polish and Russian culture.

Absolutely true.

What is also missing from the OP is any discussion of the peculiar dynamics of throne-versus-nobility conflicts stretching back a millennium and the evolution of constitutional government and individual liberties to which they contributed.

To backtrack a bit, the discussion of Chomsky is truncated and distorted. Chomsky did *not* argue that the Anglo-Saxon language was superior; he argued that there is a universal template that is unintentionally exploited in different ways by different peoples. In other words, China is as unique as the Arab world, the English world, or the Zulu world. He assuredly did not indicate that any one linguistic culture was better than the others.

Also curious is why the English language would produce a culture that is significantly different from the cultures of its sister languages; it is, after all, closer to historical Frisian than any other tongue, followed by other Teutonic/Germanic languages. The major Chinese and Indian "dialects" are vastly more different from each other than the various Germanic "languages"--the difference in classification stemming from a European prejudice that led to different standards being applied to European versus other language families. So why, if English is so similar to other European languages did its politics develop in such a different direction?

To summarize the point, Chomsky never attributed particular English or British political values and institutions to the English language. He is much too sophisticated (and anti-imperialist) to have ever walked into that cul-de-sac. Institutional history not shared with the rest of Europe or the world has much more explanatory power for England--as it does for the political institutions of other countries--than language.

I suspect CD has not read Chomsky but rather imbibed some secondary writer's interpretation of his thought. There are many bastardizations of Chomsky's analysis around, and some of them are used to argue for racist/culturalist conclusions that he rejected, and continues to reject, today.

"White" was stretched after WW2 to include Italians, Slavs, Russian Jews, Irish, Catholics, Poles, Greeks, etc.... The definition of "middle class" changed at the end of the war; pre-war middle class was an income of $3000 a year in 1929, and $3000 a year after the war. But the definition of "income" pre-war did not include wages and salaries. Tradesmen were not "middle class" by Edwardian definition.

Movies made before WW2 had a lot more ethnic in them than after the war. Look at the evolution of the portrayal of the Three Stooges from ill-fitting clown costumes to decent suits and ties, and the pre-Hays Code films.

We were bought off with flattery because of Cold War politics.

"With contemporary DNA tests, it is now fairly easy to identify not only those Americans who are of Spanish/Portuguese Jewish descent, but also those who carry that specific breast cancer marker."

That is fascinating. I never thought of using DNA testing to mine the Akash. It seems an ideal application for Akashic medicine, which deals with the karmic imprints of the past to treat cancer.

The kind of culture that produced Columbus could be expected to cause breast cancer in the modern day due to karmic influences. Tracing these influences through DNA is great science.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/04/2021 10:09AM by bradley.

Can't speak for the UK.

People came to the U.S.A. [to be (different) themselves] "FREE"! Now people are expected to be the same: NOT FREE.
Yet people terrorized the original inhabitants...
tricked them, stole from them, double crossed them... killed them... then used and abused other people (mostly Africans, initially...) to further exploit the land, customs, and heritage of everyone they could... UNITED? Hell!

Irony?

Be better than everyone else by being worse than everyone else.

P.S. Anything with United in its name might have a chance to be divided... and many people, ignorantly and selfishly, will take every opportunity they can to do just that: to be more mean, greedy, self important, impatient, kooky, crazy, untrustworthy, undependable, hateful and devicive than anyone else... though I haven't been everywhere else.

The USA could be renamed Usually Stand Alone
The "leaders" make problems for the people
And expect the people to solve them

But most are aloof, asleep, uncommitted and/ or unconcerned or unconscious.

P.PS- Hope that help (in a nutshell); shell your own nuts. If you're nuts, that'd fine. Shells are for a purpose... besides finding on the beach... which reminds me... of turtles, and clams, and oysters, and packaged food. Oooo
M@t

America! Yeah !



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/03/2021 03:59PM by Tevai.