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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zarrock God of Evil" data-source="post: 1287912" data-attributes="member: 2025">Laughable and ignorant Perceiving myself as a very openminded European with thorough experiences of the different cultures that exist on my continent (being myself Danish), I can only label the descriptions "ignorant to the point where they are just laughable." The author shows absolutely no knowledge about the countries, he describes, deeper than what one can attain through viewing old low-budget movies (who tended to present many cultures in ways bordering between disrespectful and outright racist). To me this makes the chapter completely worthless. The lest you can expect is a minimum of cultural insight, courtesy and respect. Labelling the British as inherently victims and the Irish as inherently terrorists, also shows a shocking lack of knowledge about a crisis between two countries where many gruesome acts have been committed on both sides and the placement of guilt and responsibility is so shrouded in the fogs of history and debate that such oversimplistic statements serve only to discredit the knowledge and wisdom of the author further. And this seems to be just one example. Sure, many of the positive and negative stereotypes that exist can surely serve as great roleplaying tools and we Europeans are certainly not above poking friendly fun at each others inherent differences (people would be surprised to know how different Danes, Norwegians and Swedes perceive themselves to be from their scandinavian brethren). There's no reason to be hysterical about a fair bit of stereotyping, but the degree of ignorance and knowledge demonstrated by the author in the excerpts above (which is my only basis as I do not have the book) is so blatant that it should surely disqualify him from writing anything about the real world before he decides to take the time to inform himself properly. So my advice to the author - start reading and start learning about what our real world cultures are really like, preferably firsthand, I'm sure you'll feel more enlightened afterwards. If this was written like this on purpose, I will withdraw my statements on ignorance and lack of knowledge and instead recommend that greater thought be put into future material. -Zarrock</blockquote>

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