Name one current conflict in which language and the inability to communicate is a barrier.
While the sentiment is nice and fluffy it’s also without any substance.
This is a toy for tourists and expats not a tool for world peace.
For the few cases when this isn’t the case those earbuds won’t save you from beheading.
We see it from new-Nazis as well as antifa --they actually hate people with mainstream views and, for the most part, we're the same culture, writ large.
>If Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other they won't sit idly by while the fear-mongers use the other to justify terrorism/enforced liberty importation
is easily disproven by the fact that this still happens all the time among people who speak the same language. Speaking a different language doesn't help communication obviously, but speaking the same language doesn't magically remove prejudice and hatred.
What they were saying was that "if Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other, [more often] they won't sit idly by while the fear-mongers [...]"
The counter-example of single-language conflict ignores the larger forest of language being a key leveller of cultural differences (i.e. necessary but not sufficient), as well as gp's obviously statistical rather than absolute example.
It's pretty clear he or she wasn't saying that 'as long as two people speak the same language, there will never be conflict between them.'
It’s funny that everyone brings up Muslims while one is likely to have harder times finding English speakers in many parts of Europe than in many parts of the Middle East.
But somehow you don’t dehumanize French or Italian ruralists?
It'd be easier to list the wars in which language wasn't a barrier. Excluding the category of civil wars, there aren't many wars where opposing sides largely speak a common language.
Well, that's a pretty big one, wouldn't you say? Some of the biggest, hairiest and most bloody conflicts have been civil.
The Syrian government and the rebels speaks the same language, and so do most of IS. The Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda speaks the same languages. North and South Korea speaks the same language. Croatia/Serbia/Bosnia speak (almost) the same language. The jews in Nazi Germany spoke german.
If you're trying to get to a theory that conflicts are primarily or even significantly fueled by an inability to communicate, you can't just hand-wave civil wars away.
In-group/out-group conflicts is a powerful force and it cuts a lot deeper than language.
Oh, ferchrissakes, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. The OP did a 'name one' gambit, and I pointed out that there were plenty.
Now, I'm not sure if you know this, but in WWII, the Germans fought more than just their own German-speaking Jewish population. They fought the French (don't speak German), the British (don't speak German), the Americans (don't speak German), the Polish (don't speak German), the Belgians (don't speak German), the Soviets (a collection of people, none of whom speak German), the Danish (don't speak German), the Norwegians (don't speak German), the Canadians (don't speak German), the Australians (don't speak German), the Dutch (DO speak German... but their assisting colonies didn't), the Indians (don't speak German), the Kiwis (don't speak German), the South Africans (don't speak German), the Greeks (don't speak German), the Chinese a little bit (don't speak German), the Rhodesians (don't speak German), some Yugoslavians (don't speak German), the Kenyans (don't speak German), an assortment of smaller, lesser-involved nations such as Costa Rica (also don't speak German) and, towards the end of the war, Italy... which doesn't speak German.
Not to mention that on the eve of the war, there were only about 200,000 jews left in Germany - most emigrated in the half-decade beforehand to distant places like the US. The 6M jews that were killed in the Holocaust were drawn from all over Europe - about half of them from Poland. It wasn't 6M German-speaking jews that died in the camps.
WWII claimed the lives of over 60M people, and 200k people is a rounding error on this number. It's drawing a ridiculously long bow to claim it as a civil war because a few of the victims lived in-country.
> you can't just hand-wave civil wars away.
Again, I wasn't. I was responding to the OP's 'name one'. It wasn't even a 'name one where it's a cause', just 'name one where it's a barrier'.
War is a blip.
This device isn't going to translate mosquito (for now, I'm sure at some stage it will, the possibilities are exciting for apps that analyze sounds around you)
The issues are around trade and such.
This is a very rosy sentiment but it's unrealistic not only because of the existing cultural differences and bias, but also because of the premise of the multiplayer aspect, play DOTA, BF or HALO without muting other users and tell me how it goes.
I'm pretty sure most middle easterners including Israelis don't need Google's magical earbuds to understand the meaning of "ya ibn sharmuta"...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/12/worlddispatch....