CHINESEBOTTROLL

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I mostly agree with your conclusion, but this is a very american (I.e. ignorant) response to her concern and i am not surprised she wasnt receptive. I think you underestimate the difference between a country like yours (which has always been a ‘salad bowl’ of cultures united by a commitment to liberalism) and mine (Germany, which is essentially a big tribe of tribes). This difference is even more stark if you look at a place like Denmark.

Here are a few of your points that gave me this impression:

Germany is actually younger than the US

Her concern is (to me) obviously independent of the state we happen to live under. Germaneness is not tied to a political entity. East Germans were German, Volga Germans are German and the German speaking people under the hre were German. (“German” Americans are not German btw.) This also makes your comment about

Her mom was an East German and described to us how they had an entirely separate culture

baffling (to me).

US culture has, … tangibly benefitted from immigration over the centuries.

The us is in many ways a much worse country than Germany (or almost any EU country). I don’t see why we should strive to emulate that model.

Maybe a bit advanced for this crowd, but there is a correspondence between logic and type theory (like in programming languages). Roughly we have

Proposition ≈ Type

Proof of a prop ≈ member of a Type

Implication ≈ function type

and ≈ Cartesian product

or ≈ disjoint union

true ≈ type with one element

false ≈ empty type

Once you understand it, its actually really simple and “obvious”, but the fact that this exists is really really surprising imo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence

You can also add topology into the mix:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homotopy_type_theory