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:
Isn’t that just their name in Spanish? (And French I think, maybe others too)
Removed by mod