Warbler said:
zombie84 said:
But if you are going to admit Germans and Frenchmen have distinct socio-cultural differences, then you have to admit that people in Quebec City and Vancouver, and Detroit and Dallas do as well.
Germany and France are separate countries. Detroit and Dallas are not.
That is my whole point, nationalism is an artificial construct based on lines on a map. Switzerland and France speak the same language, have some of the same cultural values, laws, foods and lifestyles, and were once part of the same empire, yet Lyon and Geneva, despite being only a 90 minute train ride apart, are separate countries because of lines on a map (whereas Lyon and Paris are a 3 hour train ride apart yet have the same amount of similarities and differences as Geneva and Lyon but are considered the same country because of borders). With geography the size of North America the difference is that the same geographical spaces and the cultural fluxuations that go with that are called states or provinces and not countries. You can think of the EU a little bit like the United States. That's why a person living in New York City may have a drastically different lifestyle, political outlook, cultural values, dietary cuisine and even speak differently than someone living in San Antonio. It's because the geographic distance is the same as between France and Greece, so despite some overarching cultural similarities, such as what you find throughout most of Europe, it is only because of nationalism that people are told that they are "the same" or are from the same "place," or that they are different for that matter.
Switzlerland and France would be like New Jersey and New York being separate countries. And who is to say they should or shouldn't be? If Switzerland and France and Germany and Ausria are different countries then why not? Or are those countries wrong in the first place and they should be grouped together? But it's arbitrary to think that way, whichever way you lean. For that matter, New York City and Toronto have way more in common than Toronto and Montreal or New York City and San Antonio, yet people from Toronto and New York are considered separate countries while people from Toronto and Montreal and NYC and San Antonio are told they are from the same one.
zombie84 said:
I'll celebrate when the Olympics are over. You know, people go on about the "history" of the Olympics, but I doubt they actually know the history. It was a late-19th centurty/ early-20th century invention, when nationalism was in full swing and we were all going to war with each other
actually first modern Olympics happened in 1896, WWI started in 1914(18 years after the start of the modern games)
Yes, as I said it was late 19th century, I never said it began around WWI, just that it came from the same general era (i.e. within 20 years).
zombie84 said:
(see WWI and the WWII holocaust, the outcome of this),
wait . . . you are actually blames WWI, WWII and holocaust on the Olympics????? and here I always thought one the objectives of the Olympics was foster peace.
Did you actually read what I posted? I said the type of thinking that birthed the Olympics is the same train of thought that led to WWI and to WWII. That is, nationalism and social darwinism, and those have a specific context. The Olympics are a product of their time, about proving your country has more gold medals and are therefore more superior to your rivals. That sort of "uber-mensch" mentality was usually measured physically, as even when it came down to smarts they were still physically measuring brain sections to determine that at the time.
zombie84 said:
before the birth of nation-states in the 19th century found a political vehicle under the guise of entertainment,
guise of entertainment??? it IS entertaining. it fun! deal with i.t
As I said, the purpose of the Olympics first and foremost was political, and it still is. It's not about the sport itself, otherwise people wouldn't be cheering for their own country regardless of the event or ability of its own athletes. It's about "my country" versus "your country", and that makes it a political competition which is justified by being entertaining.
zombie84 said:
so they resurrected a two thousand year old competition to excuse nationistic competition, and ultiumately eugenics.
eugenics??????
Yes, as I said, the Olympics were born out of the social darwinism movement. That movement is where the Nazi got their ideology for the holocaust, those ideas had been brewing since the late 19th century, and you can even see it in the writings of Nietzche (that's where his Super-Man theory came from). It's also no surprise that all of these things are tied up with the nationalism movement, which was still pretty new at the time.
zombie84 said:
but seriously, who the fuck cares if Bulgarians can jump higher than Norweigans?
its fun?
Athletic competition is fun. People wearing their flags and competing...what's the point? What's the point of specifically proving that a Bulgarian can jump higher than a Norweigan, for instance, rather than this exceptional individual can jump higher than this other exceptional individual? Does it means Bulgarians are better than Norweigans? If not, then what's the point of having everyone represent their country and wearing their flags? Why do we rank countries for their medals? It's the arbitrary nationalistic angle that doesn't make sense to me, and that's the entire point of the Olympics.
zombie84 said:
It's a stupid, stupid appendege of a time when there was slavery, eugenics and nationalism.
this statement is just asinine.
It's actually accurate if you knew a bit more about the politics of the time. The causes behind slavery didn't go away when Lincoln decided to make it illegal because it was a socio-political one and not something just in the law. That's why, even after slavery went away, you still had colonialism. And that's also where social darwinism came from, because now they could justify cultural superiority using science (they thought), and of course it's no surprise that nationalism as a movement comes out of the same time. And what do you know, around the same time they decided to use an ancient game competition to prove which country was better. And that train of thought persisted. That's one of the causes of WWI, and that line of thinking, which had been culturally ingrained for generations by the time, is what led in part to the Holocaust of WWII. And vestiges of that still survive because we still have nationism as personified by the Olympics (we also still have racism).
zombie84 said:
Also, when the Greeks competed it was at the city-state level,
that's because Greece was the only country involved!!! and please remember the ancient Greeks never considered Greece to be one country. They considered each city-state a separate country. So when Athens competed against Sparta, it was the equivalent of two nations competing against each other.
That was my whole point about geography. For a North American, it doesn't make sense for our countries to have a single team over such a huge expanse any more than it would be to have "Team EU" versus "Team West Asia."
zombie84 said:
so it would be like Los Angeles versus Berlin,
I supposed it could work, but there would be alot more Olympic teams required. You'd have to divide the USA, Canada, Russia, China, Australia?, Mexico? into dozens of different teams. It would get very complicated. To me, why not just keep the system that has worked for past over 100 years. Yeah, maybe it hold over from a different time, but so what? whatever evil things it might have fostered in the past, today it fostered peace.
Oh, it wouldn't really be practical, I was really just illustrating a point. Most countries in the world are about as big as some states in the US and smaller than most provinces in Canada, I think North American countries are the only example when it would be fairer to divide the competition into regional teams, i.e. one for each state, or divy major cities into city-states sized regions, sort of like they do in the NHL or NFL or any other sport organization around here.
zombie84 said:
and not USA versus Germany, which would seem nonsensical and idiotic to the ancient Greeks.
you sure about that? and even if it would seem nonsensical to them, so what?
For starters, there was no such thing as countries back then. And that's my whole point. The Greeks had allegiance to their city-state, because that is the geographic size that a real community can actually sustain, once you start getting bigger than that it becomes de-personalized or too complex because it's too large a region to pretend that everyone is similar or that everyone is from the same "place," which is my problem with the USA and Canada.
I'll give you a further example: here in Toronto we had in the 1990s a process called "amalgamation." This decided that the cities of North York, Scarborough, East York and Etobicoke were now actually part of the city of Toronto. It's been a social and political disaster, because the values and needs of someone living "downtown" (really, "Old Toronto", or Toronto circa 1980) are very different from the suburban culture of people living on the outer regions (which were not considered to be part of Toronto until around the 1990s and were formerly their own cities).
But it also underscores the more important point that I was making: "USA versus Germany" would not make sense to the ancient Greeks because there was no such thing as a country the way we understand that term today. The whole idea of a nation state is very, very recent. It came out of the modern era. And that's why I frankly don't give a shit. It's lines on a map, and as little as a few hundred years ago those lines and hence those countries didn't exist because there was no such thing as a nation-state until recently. When the Olympics first started there were lines on a map that said some people were Prussian. Well, Prussia doesn't exist any more--but the people that once called themselves Prussian still exist. But now their governments have convinced them that they are actually German and that they should be cheering for Germany, but depending on where they were some "Prussians" were living in land that now belongs to Poland, so those people are told to cheer for Poland because that's "their country." So people living in the same area a hundred years ago would be cheering for a different country's team, and it's just because the lines on the map changed for political reasons. And that's what it comes down to. Those map lines are completely arbitrary, and that's why the Olympics is just a politcal competition in the form of entertainment. But if you think about it, and if you know history, it is pretty nonsensical.
And that's why I don't buy into nationalism. It's all a bunch of bullshit at the end of the day, a modern device used by governments to essentially control people's allegiance. Borders exist as political entities but they aren't actually real. Nationalism has contributed to some of the worst things to have happened in the 20th century. I love atheletic competitions but when you step back from the nationistic fervor of the Olympics it doesn't really hold together.
At least it is fun though. That's why people buy it. But I'm more of a winter Olympics kind of guy.
