What other nation's culture do you admire the most?

[Footie Mad]

Originally posted by Spiffor

I greatly appreciate the Swedish collective mentalities, but I don't think it qualifies as "culture" as per the meaning of this thread.

Care to elaborate on this? I'm not really sure of what you mean and it got me curious.

[aneeshm]

Ancient Persia

[Ben Kenobi]

This is where I steal Ted Striker's pic.




USA Heck I like them better then canadian 'culture'.

[Ted Striker]

Not sure "admire" is the right words I'm going to use, but "interesting":

Italian, British, French, German, Indian, Iranian/Persian, Egyptian

[Az]

Cheers, Spiffor!

I like most of post revolutionary French culture a lot, probably the most besides 1st half of 20th century Hebrew Zionism, which I myself adhere to.

Other cultures are the ancient Romans, the Spartans, the ancient Persians, Canaanites and ancient Hebrews - which brings my point - just culture ain't enough - you have to mention the timeframe.

[VetLegion]

Finland.

[Ted Striker]

Suomi

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Gotta admire a nation that considers knifing people in the throat to be "youthful high spirits".

[VetLegion]

True

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Footie Mad
Care to elaborate on this? I'm not really sure of what you mean and it got me curious.

My strongest impression, when I visited Sweden, was that people were very open to the other. Not "open" like Mediterraneans (who tend to easily speak and offer a drink to strangers), but "open" in the meaning that there was no distrust toward complete strangers. People seemed to simply think about the others, and it gave me a general impression that everybody had the general interest in mind, which resulted in everybody being actually better off.

It's completely different with a great many mindsets, where the individuals only think about themselves, fend only for themselves, and say that the others can go **** themselves. In such societies, the one who takes the others' interest into account is the sucker. And everybody is worse off.

Practically, for me as a tourist, this Swedish mentality meant that I only encoutered helpful people, who sometimes even wasted some time to help my clueless tourist self. It meant that the cities were cripple-friendly. It meant that I didn't feel threatened by crime at any time in any place. It meant that there were good wares in the campings' collective areas, that people didn't expect to get stolen.

That's a huge to me. If I ever wanted to spend my life in a foreign country, I'd want to live in Sweden for that.

[Asher]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Finland.

Absolutely, Finland is tops.

[Ted Striker]

WHAT THE????


What is that green thing they are holding???

[VetLegion]

Spiffor, I admire that too

I think it goes under "social capital" in literature. It's very important in my opinion. Societies in which people trust each other and cooperate without coercion can go far IMO.

The only thing is, to have such a society it has to be fairly homogenous. People tend to distrust other races, ethnicities and religions.

[Ted Striker]

When I have travelled to other countries, I have often refused hospitality because I felt like I needed to protect myself. Here in USA if someone you don't know is being nice to you, usually you feel like they want something or want to take advantage of you. So the general reaction is to close up. We pretty much do that with everything.

It's the now famous society of fear that has been talked about over the past 5 years.

September 11th really brought that underlying "feature" to the surface.

[VetLegion]

You live in a big city. Maybe the small city and the countryside is different?