You don't mean that, but I get it ;-p

Edit : and the whole 'pay more because *offer and demand*' and pay more because 'you don't demand enough' is a really frightening position.
It's also good 'anti-alcohol campaign' material.

Not much one way or the other.

In my area of Switzerland, people from your part of Switzerland aren't even considered to be Swiss, we call you guys "the Russians" :D
Not sure why exactly this is so but I'm guessing it's a kind of Cold War era slang term because in those days "the Russians" were seen as scary boogeymen and the Swiss French were seen as those on the other side, I'm guessing the other side of the Röschtigraben, and therefor a threat as well and "the Russians" was a codename for any and all threats. So in fact, everyone around us are "the Russians".
As for the Swiss Italians, they got the nice name "Maisneger" which translates to "corn niggers". I'm not making this stuff up by the way. This kind of slang is commonly used in the military but seamlessly extends to civilian language as well.
In my village, people considered the inhabitants of the next village to be "hydrocephalic inbreds" and the inhabitants of the neighboring Kanton are considered foreigners already.

I think you guys in the French part of Switzerland call the Swiss-German Swiss the "termites à béton", meaning "cement eating termites" :)

It's quite funny how the "Röschtigraben" thing is still said by almost everyone despite the fact that there are a lot of Rösti products in the french part and I always see many people buying them :D

And thus, the Röschtigraben rode out of the gates of history into legend.

Yes, a lot of terms are regional, take for example Canton Obwalden and Canton Nidwalden.

People from Obwalden call people from Nidwalden "Reissäckler" ("travel sacks")
And people from Nidwalden call people from Obwalden "Tschifeler" (term for traditional wicker basket that is carried on your back)

Outside those two regions, no one has even heard of these terms.

But I must say, I don't know of any term to call people from other cantons (maybe just heard valouzes for people from valais, but adding -ouze is a common slang diminutive, applied to many thing). At worst, the official words are simply pronounced with a mock local accent, but even this is not that widespread.

I guess I simply don't live in an environment where much stress is put on these regional identities.

I was kinda surprised Russia is still on speaking terms when the Indian PM speaks with the US President in person at least once a year. Who knew, I guess.

I suppose the other side of that argument is that Germany often seems so self-loathing. Especially with regard to WW2 and the holocaust. It doesn't seem to have crippled the country. It stands as the dominant entity in the EU after all. But no doubt Germany could be a happier place if there was a certain distance between themselves and their nation's history.

But how can you learn from such terrible atrocities if you deny they ever happened? There's a middle ground there somewhere between the two that neither have yet to find.

The middle ground should be to teach both our nations' atrocities and it's triumphs. To teach other nation's atrocities and their triumphs. To focus on the damage and pain all humans can cause, as well the great things all humans are able to achieve. To learn what created the environment that led to WW2 and such rampant nationilism and genocide without punishing modern day Germans (or Japanese) for it. But a period of self loathing is inevitable. Ultimately we are all a bit nationalistic (which is good, otherwise we'd still be tribal), and we take pride but also shame in the actions of our nation).

But for old wounds to heal, first they need to be accepted before everyone can move on. Over here, there can be no moving on while Japan still denies everything it did. They have learned nothing.

Edit -> The right wing Japanese anyway, the more liberal Japanese (including a previous prime minister) are more accepting of their history.

AZ Republic newspaper as I recall it was - US domestic 93%, Iraq 05% - and the rest. Representative, eh?

In Varietate Concordia - United in Diversity - motto of Europe.

And maybe naïvely I believe in it, as a pleasure and privilege of exchanging and interacting. But also I expect that some hard questions, such as theocratic influences alien to European ideals, must be ultimately addressed.


Edit: PS: lest more high flying ideas be thought of, I simply refer to Ireland and Poland.

Am I the only one that reads the thread title as "Regretful questions to foreign GOGers"?

I don't think that Germany is oblivious to their triumphs. But yes, in principal I think that you're right. It would mostly depend on how that information is conveyed as to how successful it is.

As for Japan, I think that enough time has passed for them to admit the crimes of the past without people being weighed down by a sense of national guilt. But then Japanese culture is pretty alien to me, so I might be wrong about that.

I may have asked about this before:

Question to people in Thailand (and other countries if relevant): why aren't pedestrians' reflectors (cat's-eyes) used nor sold there? Is it about:

- money (ie. you don't want to spend even a small amount of money on something you don't deem 100% necessary, even though these are)

- fashion (it doesn't look cool to wear reflectors)

- religion (quite many (religious) thai people I know seem to believe in destiny and that everything has been decided beforehand for you; so if you are going to be hit by a car on a certain day, that'll happen no matter how much you'd try to avoid it, meaning using a reflector will not change anything)

- people just prefer to walk undetected, like ninjas in the night.

This always occurs to me when driving after 8pm or so, when it gets fully dark, in Thai rural areas. People are walking or cycling beside the road, fully dark. I've been several times very close to hitting someone because I don't see them well in advance.

I recall seeing once an old motorcycle, where the rearlight was broken, with a dangled CD-R disc at the back. I presume it was used as a sort of reflector so that cars can see it from behind.

Would it be a good business to start importing and selling reflectors to pedestrians in Thailand? Are the people there just not aware of such a marvelous and cheap invention?

EDIT: Interestingly, the Finnish Wikipedia pages for reflectors ("heijastin") claim that pedestrian's reflectors are not really that known outside of Nordic countries, and a certain Finnish plastic company (Coreplast Laitila Oy) is world's biggest manufacturer of pedestrian's reflectors:

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heijastin#Jalankulkijaheijastimet

EDIT2: Actually, it even says they are a Finnish invention? I seriously didn't know that, albeit it makes sense that you need them the most during dark Nordic winters.

While one might think that such reflectors are needed only in dark winters of northern countries (summer nights here are quite bright), that's not really the case. E.g. in Thailand it seems to get dark already around 7pm, and people still move around then. And the nights are pitch dark all around the year, unlike here in north where only winter nights are dark (and long).

Still this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD-ylNurlLM

The main problem is that there's a vocal minority - especially in the bureaucracy and the education system - that's ready to play either the Nazi card or at the very least the "dangerous nationalism" card about even the most benign attempts to discuss anything "triumph-like" that happened in Germany between ~1648 and 1914, so most people have learned to be quiet and it often falls to historians (who either have nothing to lose thanks to tenure, or are eminent enough to be untouchable) to discuss these things. And their delivery tends to not be "sexy" enough for mass consumption.

Case in point: The first time I became aware of the Franco-German War of 1870/71 (which led to the first modern German unification) was via computer games, while quite some time in school was spent on the arguably less important (but much more "feel-good") and in many respects essentially failed 1848 revolutions. That was some 15-20 years ago, but I doubt it's much different now.

Occasionally you get something with popular outreach like the year-long celebrations (with lots of public exhibitions etc.) on the occasion of the 300th birthday of Frederick the Great two years ago, but even those often appear to be a tight-rope walking act, lest they cause cries of "glorification of violence and militarism" or some such anti-historical nonsense from the usual suspects.