By the way, I’ve tried telling Republicans that calling everything they don’t like “Socialist” is probably partially responsible for the rise in positive associations with the word “Socialist” in Millennials.
This isn’t really a left-wing limited phenomena. It’s probably a kind of collective action problem in which individuals and individual uses of the word can accrue benefit, even though long-term it wears out the meaning.
So Millennials are associating “Socialism” with high-functioning welfare capitalist states, rather than say, the Soviet Union, or less dramatically, Venezeula.
Some people have noticed people who are actual Fascists and hate Jews saying “hah, the Left calls everyone a Nazi!” even when they fit the bill pretty well.
This is a form of camouflage enabled by calling too many people Nazis, and the self-aware ones know they’re doing it.
Man, guy saying we need a “revolutionary mass movement” to counter the influence of white supremacists on behalf of a supermajority of Americans…
Yeah buddy, I don’t see you supporting that for any other issue there’s a supermajority of American support on. One of the tricks with Trump is that a chunk of the stuff he says that sparks outrage and incredulity is stuff with majority support.
I can’t help but be concerned that a “revolutionary mass movement” would be far worse. Likely to overturn the Bill of Rights, massively restrict speech, or attempt to implement (and then botch) Socialism. If it comes to that, it’s time to break up the Union.
Congratulations! In an effort to be interesting and unique, you have rendered yourself as boring and predictable as possible — how do you plead? Hey stop photoshopping vaporwave succ memes for a second and listen to me
No.
This isn’t me criticizing you as a human being or trying to make fun of you or anything but an earnest question: what the hell does any part of your description mean? Can you give me an example of how your political stances apply to the real world in a non hypothetical sci fi genre way I can’t picture it
I will answer this question when I have access to a Real Computer, which will be a while.
The culture war mentality is: “Everything bad causes and is caused by everything else bad. Everything good causes and is caused by everything else good.“
Culture warriors do not only want to get popular people to join their cause, they also push unpopular people to join the other side. You can do both at the same time by accusing unpopular people of being on the other side. When they defend themselves, you can crucify them for disagreeing with the good people. When they don’t defend themselves, they must do a purity ritual (http://raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/156092750438/funereal-disease-misanthropymademe) to escape scrutiny. Name other witches so you won’t be burned at the stake!
Popularity is not the be-all-end-all, but the currency. You can cash in on your popularity. You can also gain more popularity for yourself and cash in on the unpopularity of others by forcing them to either disagree with you, highlighting your difference from the unpopulars, or to agree with you, which you can spin as their submission.
Many of the stranger outgrowths of twitter mobs, The Discourse, hot takes and thinkpiece culture do not directly pick on the uncool kids to elevate the cool kids, but stake out territory for the cool kids to claim. Uncool kids have 48 hours to vacate he premises until they are no longer allowed to have the cool opinions.
The thing is, I don’t think what the racial nationalists want is racism as a terminal value. I think for most of them, there are other things that they want, and they see having an [ethnicity]-only country as the only practical or effective way to achieve these things.
This is why I believe most of them can eventually leave racial nationalism, if we work towards making the conditions right, which requires a bunch of stuff we should be doing anyway even if there were no racial nationalists.
We’ve all seen various Leftists denouncing “Nationalists and their dumb wars.” While it can be tempting to argue the point regarding past interventions, the future of Nationalism must lay in the future, not the past.
It’s important, in attempting to define a new form of Nationalism, to understand that dumb wars don’t just have a price paid in blood and treasure, but also in the national spirit. Dumb wars undermine and destroy Nationalism.
Nationalism is not only an ideology, but it’s also a form of ideological or political capital. The will of the people to support the government and fight on behalf of the country, while necessary to secure the national defense, is an exhaustible resource. It is very precious, for without it there cannot be a nation. Therefore, in addition to acting to promote it, we must also act to conserve it. A nation that can rise up as one in military response has far greater power and sovereignty than those with only fragmented support, as both its threats and defense are more credible.
Propaganda cannot be the answer, as truth has odds of coming out eventually, since it is less in conflict with reality. And it was some truth or another that lead many of us to become Nationalists in the first place.
Think about it. Suppose you get into some dumb, unwinnable war in the middle east or southeast Asia. In order to pay for the war, you have to raise taxes (if not now, then later), diverting resources from the civic goods those taxes might have paid for. To get the necessary manpower, you must either create a draft, which creates opposition to the draft and thus empowers internal opposition and counter-culture, or your have to raise taxes higher and send some of your most loyal men to get shot at.
Then the history comes along later and says that not only was the mission not a success, but you didn’t even get any resources out of it for the country.
Not only does this make people less likely to sign up for or provide material support for the nation’s wars, but they may come to believe that the nation is bad and turn against Nationalism itself.
How much less powerful would left-wing anti-Nationalists be without the Iraq War? How much less powerful would they be without the Vietnam War?
On top of this all, it may end up preventing the country from having the ability to fight wars in ways that it can win. Having sowed substantial doubt about the virtue of the nation’s military action itself, it will be harder to obtain the necessary political will for the required partial cultural conversion needed to ensure the invaded territory is permanently no longer an enemy.
(Of course, there are other factors that can lead to declines in Nationalism, even in countries with less substantial military adventurism. But those must be addressed separately.)
i don't know who else to complain to about this but everydayfeminism just posted an article saying trumpcare was inevitable and we should all be focusing on 'ancestral medicine' instead, including asking our ancestors for healing and going outside more (while being careful not to culturally appropriate of course) and i'm just... honestly floored? some of the stuff that has crept into the 'mainstream sj' collective consciousness is so unbelivable i wanna die
Trying to put a few more of my scattered thoughts on this “hardcore civic nationalism“ thing just so I can synthesize what I’ve seen.
I think this group has a complicated relationship with immigration. There is this abstract sense with which they are pro-immigration because part of being a good nation is having people, but it depends on those national cultural institutions being strong. They are in favor of cultural institutions being strong in part so they can allow immigration, there’s this very assimilationist thought here. They have some opinions on what that national cultural thought should be, but it’s more critical that the thought exists than the precise details of that thought. You can synthesize the idea of their nationalism there, it’s sort of “our nation is so great that other people want to join it”
I sort of mentioned the rightward edge because I needed to separate them from ethnic nationalists, but there is a leftward social democratic leaning edge too. The public works aspect provides opportunities to help people build a society while making sure nobody goes hungry, they’d take unemployment seriously, and anti-racist measures are both good in themselves and perfectly reasonable as methods of building national cohesion. Conceptually, you can sort of view this national culture thing as reducing the need for hierarchy, instead of having society conceptualized by you serving your boss, priest, or husband, everyone serves the national idea and we are all nominally equal. So this can be thought of and constructed as egalitarian.
That is all pretty reasonable, though alternatively under immigration, a nationalism which believes in national cultures and accompanying law bundles can view immigration as matching people according to desired legal/cultural configuration. Therefore, for it to make sense, some level of immigration/emigration should exist, though not necessarily for major net growth.
The thing is, I don’t think what the racial nationalists want is racism as a terminal value. I think for most of them, there are other things that they want, and they see having an [ethnicity]-only country as the only practical or effective way to achieve these things.
This is why I believe most of them can eventually leave racial nationalism, if we work towards making the conditions right, which requires a bunch of stuff we should be doing anyway even if there were no racial nationalists.
What are beliefs common among "hardcore civic nationalists"?
They’re skeptical of globalization in general just like the other
anti-establishment groups, and tend towards anti-interventionism. They’re
generally in favor of public infrastructure and public projects, but
have mixed thoughts on welfare. Assimilation and the
act of building the national culture are a big deal, that affects their
views on immigration which can be flexible depending on their view of circumstances. Seem to shun ethnic nationalism, I get the
impression that some of them on the rightward edge do buy into some form of bell curve stuff
but they’ve decided it’s basically not terribly important, if somebody
isn’t highly intelligent there’s a lot of work to be done that doesn’t
require high intelligence to do. Neither especially pro or anti-market, I think they tend towards “not too afraid of public spending or taxation but somewhat anti-regulation.“
And you can sort of see that
as a third way, it’s the recognition that you depend on the people and
environment around you and therefore you can’t really get away from this
concept of the common good and improving society, but skeptical of
taking it too far. “selfish collectivism“ might be a somewhat trollish way of
putting it. Class-wise I think the people I’ve seen with it are educated professionals, I think this sort of inherits from “Rockefeller Republicans“
@mitigatedchaos, you are sort of close to this but you’re not a central example. This is pretty much random disconnected things I’ve found off tumblr, there isn’t really a big repository or central hub of this that I can think of. I mean, I’m not even honestly sure this is a real ideology or something I’m putting together in my head from people I think speak similarly but who don’t actually agree with each other.
I can’t be the only one that has noticed that modern collective intergenerational ethnic justice incentivizes having wiped out conquered peoples to the last man, woman, and child, because then there is no one to initiate the “lawsuit”.
How many cases do we have of that, and how did it actually work out relative to leaving a small or moderate amount of people alive?
There are other options, which include inter-marrying/etc until there is not enough difference to tell, and thus the equivalent of a lawsuit cannot be pressed, but often this is not very nice, either.
But basically, until recently, just about every ethnic group did some combination of these two in order to obtain and control territory, from what I can tell, with few exceptions. And of course, we’re not likely to hear much about the guys that got wiped out, as they’re no longer around to protest.
You know that Tumblr “Anti-Nazi” FAQ post that ends with “what if I thought I was punching a Nazi, but it was actually just a white dude with a shitty haircut?” “Run.”?
I said that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t expect it to get quite so literal.
Of course, in this environment, who knows if this is real, but this is basically what one would expect. The most punch-happy are going to be the least controlled about who they punch.
Sometimes I worry that everybody, including me, EA’s, silicon valley, the media, and so on should be more concerned about climate change than we actually are.
the most effective thing to be doing at any given moment is trying to take over the world
When are we going to get the North American release date for Aloha Argumate-Senpai!: Discourse Beach and the Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San supplement? The fan translations are pretty terrible, unless you *intended* to write "that cat is Neoreaction! Slay!" for Yud-chan.
I really hope I never understand all of those words.
I can’t be the only one that has noticed that modern collective intergenerational ethnic justice incentivizes having wiped out conquered peoples to the last man, woman, and child, because then there is no one to initiate the “lawsuit”.
wait wait, is this Ayn Rand having a harem, or a harem of Ayn Rands? I don’t know that much about the people around her except that they were cliquey or something
Scott Adam’s “It’s going to be embarrassing to be anti-trump six months after inauguration“ is funny, but thinking back I saw a fair amount of that type of stuff. People really seemed to think the infrastructure stuff was going to happen, not just on the right, there’s this cluster of anti-establishment centrists that weren’t terribly pro-trump as a person but really seemed to hope something would happen.
As one of those centrists, I should not have overestimated the competence of the Republican Party just because the Democratic Party is stupid. Ofc, I didn’t go proclaiming it to the hills because I always figured it might not happen. He still has a few years left to accomplish this, though.
Didn’t we predict this would happen. They’re coming for your history and nothing is safe from being declared bad and worthy of destruction.
Yes, but there’s a difference.
This will never happen.
This pastor can go gently caress himself.
People are acting like they haven’t been saying this shit for years already.
This rhetoric is as old, if not older than, the Black Panther Party. Treating it like something new just means you’ve been ignorant up til now.
People are acting like white nationalists are just now popping back into existence, as if their dumb marches hadn’t been going on the entire time, and that this is an emergency and we must give social license to left-wing vigilantes to attack people outside of the law. Though in fairness, the confederate statues hadn’t gone anywhere for years, and now they’re being removed in many places.
I’d like to see you and rtrixie make a bet on this.
You’re inaccurate, but only by half.
Left-wingers and American Liberals have been talking about white nationalism, white nationalists, and far-right extremists for years now. They were talking about it all through the Bush and Obama presidencies, as were the FBI and Department of Justice.
They’ve just grown and gotten so big recently that now the right-wing can’t ignore them anymore, so now they have to acknowledge it as well.
I lived through the Bush and Obama presidencies, and the left-wingers and liberals I knew were not doing this “OMG NAZZIS!!” thing at this level. Obviously, some of them ran around calling GWB a Fascist, which is part of why I don’t treat their outrage on this as serious, but it wasn’t lit up like this. There are a bunch of things they won’t actually do that they’d need to do for me to respect their outrage again.
Er, since when is Google 'free' unless your library's easily accessed? The electronics that support Internet access & research (much less proper cross-referencing) don't spring from thin air. Sometimes people are simply not given the time & energy (mental or physical) to keep up. Doesn't mean it's OK to generalize or interrogate any affronted individual, but holy crap does this 'absorb everything by osmosis' approach not work for anyone who can't run the treadmill all day every day.
…someone who understood what i was trying to say, omfg
and also like… do people know what to Google? I do, but that’s because I’ve already been in SJ circles
I mean, like, I haven’t actually Googled “things that offend POC” (and wouldn’t) but I can easily imagine that it, or queries like it, might return exactly the sorts of result SJ types would not want un-woke-yet wypipo reading.
So it’s… my problem is it seems so much like advice from inside the circle. And… dude, we have a country to save. We need to be talking to people outside the circle, getting them to come in. And that means not setting up barriers like “don’t talk to me unless you are THIS woke”
Didn’t we predict this would happen. They’re coming for your history and nothing is safe from being declared bad and worthy of destruction.
Yes, but there’s a difference.
This will never happen.
This pastor can go gently caress himself.
People are acting like they haven’t been saying this shit for years already.
This rhetoric is as old, if not older than, the Black Panther Party. Treating it like something new just means you’ve been ignorant up til now.
People are acting like white nationalists are just now popping back into existence, as if their dumb marches hadn’t been going on the entire time, and that this is an emergency and we must give social license to left-wing vigilantes to attack people outside of the law. Though in fairness, the confederate statues hadn’t gone anywhere for years, and now they’re being removed in many places.
I’d like to see you and rtrixie make a bet on this.
Er, since when is Google 'free' unless your library's easily accessed? The electronics that support Internet access & research (much less proper cross-referencing) don't spring from thin air. Sometimes people are simply not given the time & energy (mental or physical) to keep up. Doesn't mean it's OK to generalize or interrogate any affronted individual, but holy crap does this 'absorb everything by osmosis' approach not work for anyone who can't run the treadmill all day every day.
…someone who understood what i was trying to say, omfg
and also like… do people know what to Google? I do, but that’s because I’ve already been in SJ circles
I mean, like, I haven’t actually Googled “things that offend POC” (and wouldn’t) but I can easily imagine that it, or queries like it, might return exactly the sorts of result SJ types would not want un-woke-yet wypipo reading.
So it’s… my problem is it seems so much like advice from inside the circle. And… dude, we have a country to save. We need to be talking to people outside the circle, getting them to come in. And that means not setting up barriers like “don’t talk to me unless you are THIS woke”
When the odds of successful revolution are low, the revolutionaries will tend to be stupid, incompetent, crazy, or ideology-huffed compared to when the odds of successful revolution are high. Smart, competent, sane people would benefit more by doing something else with their time.
AU in which Trump is a smart authoritarian & Bannon is still in the White House:
Trump condemns white supremacists, denounces both violence and “free speech”, asks for emergency government powers to crack down on Nazis, and enlists Silicon Valley to block extremist speech in a PRISM-like program with an API the government can use to blacklist extremist phrases.
dreamed last night the president died by driving his golf buggy into the the sea because someone on twitter dared him to. 2017 is surreal enough, but not merciful enough,for this to really happen.
Jealous liberal media publishing FAKE NEWS that I won’t drive into the sea. They will change their tune tomorrow in Atlantic City!
if you could recommend one book to Donald Trump and Theresa May, what would it be and why?
I’d pick a few choice articles from Slate Star Codex and a few other sites have them bound as a book. Something short enough that it wouldn’t lose Trump’s attention.
You’re assuming, I think, that I am virtuous like these other ratsphere members and read lots of books. I’m not virtuous in that way (which brings me a long-running sense of shame). I have some formal education in Political Science, Economics, etc, but what you’re seeing on this blog is leaning more on intuitive synthesis from articles on the internet, observations, and so on.
So, when I suggest replacing the legislature with think-tank-parties or reorganizing school around spaced repetition using computers, which are both outside the envelope of what people are thinking about right now in terms of reforms, it isn’t because I’m some deep, learned expert at organizational engineering (which is a field that doesn’t even exist yet), but because I’m extrapolating various limited information and experience in novel ways to reach out farther into the policy space.
The awkward issue is that if I were the kind of deep-reader person and not the novelty-craver person I am, I would not have gained the necessary experiences / ways of thinking / depth of search in order to escape the existing envelope with proposals anyway, probably. I wouldn’t be writing a blog of half politics and half futurist shitposting designed to make readers think about possible futures. Said blog wouldn’t have the Union Girl branding associated with it. There would be no video game potentially in the works because I would either lack coding or 3d artist ability or both.
What reading I have done gets pruned of its, for lack of a better word, citations, and instead updates an intuitive base. There are probably books I would want them to read, but instead of remembering what they are, I changed and moved on.
I'm concerned that the current trend of punching/killing nazis discourse, the growing categorization of 'nazi adjacent', and the use of the Gadsden flag among certain political groups will lead to Leftist groups symbolically going around stepping on snakes. Protect the noodles! D:
in Australia the noodles are quite capable of protecting themselves tbh
“One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.”—
possibly one of the stupidest things ever written? we may never know. (via argumate)
In which the grass is always greener on the other side of the thinkpiece writer.
One thing I really love about you weird internet nerds here on Rationalist Tumblr is your lower-than-average level of hypocrisy.
Basically all of you who would be skeptical about granting legitimacy to right-wing vigilantes in the after-effects of politically-motivated vehicular homicide by one of the right’s outgroups are also skeptical about granting legitimacy to left-wing vigilantes in the aftermath of politically-motivated vehicular homicide by one of the left’s outgroups.
You are all doing much better than what I’m seeing on Facebook right now.
you know that facebook post that goes like ‘this is why white culture doesn’t exist and i can trace my heritage back to europe so i’m (specific country)-culture and not (white)-culture’?
like i don’t want to shit on the author because its not that important, but it’s such a stupid approach? only an american would think that. white americans are not white irishmen, or white dutchmen, or whatever, they are white americans. white americans with dutch heritage are so different from white dutch people, so saying that white americans don’t have a white american culture but instead some sort of weird? european thing? its just bullshit. i mean, americans go to shopping malls and eat a lot of sugar and smile all the fucking time and are very enthusiastic? and care about some weird form of football for some reason. i’m not saying that the author can’t take pride in their heritage or can’t go to cultural parties or anything, i’m just saying that its not the same
I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
Dammit if you aren’t an obvious supervillain, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to vote for you anyway. I would definitely support any candidate whose slogan was “Put lasers in Lady Liberty”.
I guess I just love grandiose symbols. (Please tell me you’d also upgrade Mount Rushmore. And build some monument to humanity’s might on the moon.)
While other parties believe in vague rhetoric like “Making America Great Again” and “bringing harmony to our divided nation”, the National Technocratic Party believes in specific, measurable, achievable policy goals, such as those outlined in our Enhanced Civil Defense Plan for the Weaponization of National Monuments, our whitepapers on lunar war, and in the 2028 Prediction Budget produced by the Central Committee.
I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
"Are Memes Getting Too Dangerous? - Elusive Australian Tumblr teen Argumate found dead at age of 78 from acute meme poisoning, coroner finds, blames sudden outbreak of bad 'thrussy' memes" - the news, probably
So in the discussion over whether internet companies can deny hosting to Nazis (such as here and here), I admit I see both sides. I understand the concerns that this grants too much discretionary power to large establishments about what speech is allowed on the internet, and I understand that “Nazis marching in the streets with torches and the organizing thereof is different and inimical to civil society.”
My question is, can anyone offer an argument for why private companies should get to choose this?
Like on the anti-Nazi side, everything they say makes a case for why it should just be illegal to host this violent, reactionary rhetoric.
And on the pro-free-speech side, everything they say makes a case for why no gatekeeper is pure enough to decide who does and doesn’t get to speak.
But what’s the logic for “maybe Nazis get to organize online, maybe they don’t, and that decision should be up to the rich people who control internet companies?”
It goes like this:
“Nazis can do whatever they want on their own time but this is my server that I’ve purchased with my money so therefore it’s me that gets to decide what pages are hosted on it.”
It becomes significantly more cloudy when we get to registrars like godaddy. They are a government-monopoly-by-proxy through ICANN.
Okay so I thought people weren’t going to take the naively deontic argument here, which is why I skipped it. But very well.
One, as @mitigatedchaos these aren’t really about “your property,” in as much as the CEO’s making these decisions often are not the shareholders, but managers entrusted to make the shareholders money (or other complicated legal entities”. These people have a ton of leniency in those decisions, but “what speech should be expressed” is generally not in the CEO job description. Maybe they make good decisions or bad, but I have trouble seeing fundamental property rights being worked up for the managers making these decisions. If it was a vote of shareholders that would be different.
But two, more importantly, I assume I am talking with people who think the internet should be largely content neutral. People who do not want Google to stop listing supporters of Bernie Sanders. People who don’t want Twitter blocking any criticism of feminism. People who’d be afraid if TWC stopped delivering content about either the Democratic or Republican parties. Maybe you wouldn’t be sure such actions are illegal, but you sure as hell would feel they are unethical.
Most people who are comfortable with Nazi’s getting deplatformed this way are so because they believe Nazi’s (or at least their current rioting actions) are different than just another point of view.
If you think a web company should continue to host political opinions they disagree with, but not that of Nazis organizing armed rallies, which I really do think is a reasonable point of view, then why do you think that question should be up to the CEO of the company?
(Or, to avoid the hot button topic of government regulation - I can see the argument for all hosts are open to Nazis, and the argument for no hosts being open to Nazis, what’s the argument for some hosts being open to Nazis?)
I’m not sure I would agree even if it were a shareholder vote.
Limiting legal liability is an absolutely extraordinary concession on the part of the state, not only to CEO but also to shareholders. The ability to even get the right-of-ways necessary to even construct those cable lines also depends on state power.
Especially as institutional size increases, the potential damage from legal liability also increases.
Therefore, in my opinion, “but it’s my server” has only fairly weak standing as a moral argument for large or even mid-size corporations.
(There are, of course, other considerations, too. Corps resisting warrantless surveillance of customers in the US is overall a good thing, for instance.)
