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Comment by Pay08 | Hacker News Reader

Language is the biggest thing that defines culture. Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?

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> Language is the biggest thing that defines culture

Lots of countries would disagree with this. Do you not think Peru and Spain has distinct cultures for example? Why/why not?

As you can clearly see, I did not say language was the only thing that defines culture.

Do you think Peruvian culture is closer to Spanish or Swedish culture?

Your second question, "Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?", really makes it unclear if you actually realize that language isn't the only thing that defines culture, why would that be a question otherwise?

Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live.

Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.

What a sad world where we all have the same culture and language. There's many concepts that don't translate from one language to the next, they form a way of looking at the world. What about foods, and stories and music, nah, sounds terrible.

I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language

So there's only one single culture in all english speaking countries? A unified language does not in any way imply a boring or "assimilated" culture. Dutch people can still ask their closest friend to Venmo them 2 bucks for the fries they took earlier, germans can still make and drink objectively better beer, and the french can still be black and white and smoking a cigarette. But just in english instead.

OP literally advocated for having a single culture.

And you missed the part I said about how different human concepts don't exist in all languages, do we just not have those? Language is an integral part of different cultures, not the only one, but a pretty big one. Can't believe I'm having to defend this.

Frankly, this belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works.

Small countries are already doing this through the Internet since so much of the consumed content is in English.

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