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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

I have no clue what English comprehension, monolith culture, and condescension have to do with one another? Or even the presumption that I only speak English?

It's not a strange statement in the slightest if you live here or spend any appreciable time here. I take it you do not.

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I think you misunderstand their point. I think their point is that it's difficult to talk about a "typical European condescension" given that "Europe" is not one culture. It's made of many very different countries.

If you randomly take two Europeans, they probably speak a different language and have completely different opinions, but chances are that they can't even understand each other. If you randomly take two US citizen, they most certainly have a shared identity.

I think that is not nearly as certain as you say. Some identities are very very outside the norms of local culture. (For example, I identify non-human, which is quite rare in any part of the world)

Well no two identities are exactly the same. But there is a shared part. It's an intersection.

When the USA hockey team played against Canada after Trump threatened to annex Canada, the Canadians booed the US team. Not because they hated the players, but because they wanted to show that they were pissed. As a response, the US supporters booed the Canadian players. Why? Because they felt attacked "as Americans", not because they supported Trump's idea of militarily invading Canada.

That is a shared identity. And surely in this crowd, not everybody identified as a white heterosexual male.

Just because it's the vast majority still doesn't mean it's certain, though.

Oh given current affairs I don't even think two US neighbors have shared identity. Plus the whole thing about intersectionalism.. basically cut everyone into a million little groups and identifiers, nobody is left the same as anyone else.

I didn't say "they are the same". I said they share some part of their identity. It starts by saying "I am an American". Or thinking that 9/11 was an attack on their country. Or having the same government. Or having the same army. Or the same schooling system.

If you take two random Europeans, they most likely don't have the same school system. The bank of the first probably does not exist in the country of the second. One may be in the EU, the other may not. They have a different army, they possibly have a long history of being at war against each other in the past. They don't have the same architecture. They have a vastly different public transport system.

Sure, there is an identity at every level. Europeans do recognise themselves as Europeans, like South Americans do recognise themselves as South Americans. But the shared identity between a Chilean and a Brazilian is much smaller than the shared identity between two Brazilians.

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