tpholland

Completely agree. The whole spoilers thing is relatively recent and I think there's a strong argument that people who object to discussion of the narrative in any discussion of works of narrative art probably need to just avoid reading about anything. If you really don't want to know about a film or book because you're reserving judgement that's fine, but online communities these days seem fine with censoring discussion these days based on lazy spoiler grounds.

I appreciate this point of view, but I think people who are religiously adhering to "spoilers" to censor aesthetic discussion need to be honest about highlighting what they are doing. A proper discussion about this would have been explicit about what was being discussed. We are not children.

I have revisited this thread, after having originally left despairing of the weird conversation. Thanks so much for clarifying what's going on! I hadn't followed this film and assumed people were afraid of being picked off the streets by the government if they spoke articulately about it. It's the "spoilers" problem then--online people who aren't used to how creative works are discussed thinking they have to use tradecraft. Ze beef iz in ze butchers!

But great news for Slovenians!

OK. There's not much antisemitism in London though. It's a major world city.

It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.

And the word "suspenders" in British English means what Americans would call a garter belt, hence it sounding particularly odd over here.

Hi! It sounds like you may have misunderstood the TV license as you seem to be describing it as a recent thing whereas it was introduced 80 years ago in 1946. The point of the license was always to fund broadcast content--not sure how this could apply to VPN use. I think the discussion of VPNs relates to how, if we decided it was appropriate to block foreign sites, you'd accomplish this. As somebody who grew up in the heady days of the early internet this who conversation saddens me, but when you hear for example interviews with the folks running Roblox you can see where these ideas come from....

OK, you probably have a point. As they say, once you've seen the La Tène cultural package....

I quite agree. It's a diversity of peoples who have developed an umbrella identity that dates back a long time. And it's been very successful!

They have a successful federal structure; much more so than more recent confederacies referred to by others in this thread (Belgium, Canada).

Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change

Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.

Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and maybe there is something there. But the idea that either diversity or homogeneity can explain economic performance is obviously not bourne out by any serious examples. I was thinking about Belgium (and also thinking about Harry Lime) whilst typing away--it seems a bit of a counterexample to Switzerland where the same linguistic and cultural diversity within a country can lead to very different outcomes and senses. Nobody would ever write "Il n'y a pas de Suisse" as Destrée wrote "Il n'y a pas de Belges"--long history vs short history and as always the Reformation upheavals explain it perhaps

Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!

This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.

What did you mean when you said homogenous, given the reality of Switzerland, its history, its civil structure, its languages, and its culture?