I hope anon was around for your last 10 posts on cousin marriage, because without more context than this, your emphasis on it may read as weird and crackpottish.
You know, I did assume that they wouldn’t bother sending an anon ask if they don’t read this blog.
Now I’m left wondering what my rate of drive-by anons is.
I hope anon was around for your last 10 posts on cousin marriage, because without more context than this, your emphasis on it may read as weird and crackpottish.
You know, I did assume that they wouldn’t bother sending an anon ask if they don’t read this blog.
What seriously separates cosmopoli from ethnonational states? And what seriously makes them worse? Their lifetimes seem comparable to me, especially given that most countries didn't experience a national awakening until kings started consolidating feudal conglomerations towards the dawn of capitalism.
You don’t need a pure ethnonational country, though that can cut down on certain bullshit like what’s happening between the Buddhists and the Muslims in Myanmar. (Hint: It isn’t solely a story of purely poor, innocent Muslims, but one of those cases of cyclical retaliatory ethnic violence.)
The chief question is, are you willing to do what it takes to make that cosmopolitan polity not descend into retaliatory ethnic violence, potential ethnic predation, and ethnicity-aligned political parties?
Like, if you’re not willing to do that, then what you get is ethnic violence.
If you look over at what’s happening in the British cities, with the child sex trafficking, and grooming, and so on, and not only are you not willing to slam down the iron hand of the state to stop it dead in its tracks, but you won’t even stop them from marrying their cousins at rates way above what is normal or even healthy, then you don’t really have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work.
And if you don’t have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work, then an ethnic polity is a safer choice.
This is somewhat disguised by the fact that not all cultures are equally destabilizing. You can pretend, for a while, if the underlying conditions are right, and succeed by accident.
Additionally, cosmopolitan vs ethnonationalism is a continuum, not a binary. Well actually it’s a multidimensional space, not a continuum. But you get the idea.
What seriously separates cosmopoli from ethnonational states? And what seriously makes them worse? Their lifetimes seem comparable to me, especially given that most countries didn't experience a national awakening until kings started consolidating feudal conglomerations towards the dawn of capitalism.
You don’t need a pure ethnonational country, though that can cut down on certain bullshit like what’s happening between the Buddhists and the Muslims in Myanmar. (Hint: It isn’t solely a story of purely poor, innocent Muslims, but one of those cases of cyclical retaliatory ethnic violence.)
The chief question is, are you willing to do what it takes to make that cosmopolitan polity not descend into retaliatory ethnic violence, potential ethnic predation, and ethnicity-aligned political parties?
Like, if you’re not willing to do that, then what you get is ethnic violence.
If you look over at what’s happening in the British cities, with the child sex trafficking, and grooming, and so on, and not only are you not willing to slam down the iron hand of the state to stop it dead in its tracks, but you won’t even stop them from marrying their cousins at rates way above what is normal or even healthy(Wikipedia, wrt ethnic rates of cousin marriage and assoc. issues in UK, etc), then you don’t really have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work.
And if you don’t have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work, then an ethnic polity is a safer choice.
This is somewhat disguised by the fact that not all cultures are equally destabilizing. You can pretend, for a while, if the underlying conditions are right, and succeed by accident.
Additionally, cosmopolitan vs ethnonationalism is a continuum, not a binary. Well actually it’s a multidimensional space, not a continuum. But you get the idea.
No one who has seriously thought it through believes the dakimakura rumour. After all, why would a chronofelon settle for a mere image?
By 2056, every Wikipedia page of any figure of note, from George Washington to clerks for the Song Dynasty, has one of these as the primary image on the page instead of, you know, a painting or photograph.
Disney bought the rights in 2077 and manufactures a line of branded, family-friendly (by 2077 standards) androgynoids.
But Miti, how are your anons supposed to optimize our asks for creepiness and/or offensiveness if we don't know your race and gender? Won't you think of the anons?
Ugggh. Who do you think you are, Google?
Come back when you’re a multinational corporation physically embodying the threat of a societal panopticon in order to more efficiently sell Authentic™ skinny mom jeans to hipsters, loser.
I am ANNOYED by people who are like “yay moderation boo extremism ~radical centrism~”
the centrist American position is that powerful people can commit crimes against humanity without ever facing trial, while poor people go to prison for being drug addicts
I hold extremist opinions like “the rule of law is a good idea” and “unchecked executive power is bad” and “people should respect the constitution” and “STOP COMMITTING WAR CRIMES”
I don’t think that kind of Centrism counts as Radical™.
or overall hormone levels and mating strategies significantly change,
then it makes sense to revisit the idea of multiple marriage for normies.
(Much like, for vegans, vatmeat becoming available means revisiting the idea of eating meat!)
A social synthesis for a healthy society depends on various conditions/truths about that society. The rules for a society of near-immortals are naturally going to be different from the rules for a society with a life expectancy of 40.
I saw the title “The Virgin Suicides” the other day and now my brain noise keeps saying “The Virgin Suicides vs The Chad Homicides”
The Chad Homicides, which claims to have been written by “An Actual Rat”, is perhaps one of this year’s most unique books. Following the story of internationally acclaimed drug dealer Chadwick Bristol, who is pulled against his will into a series of murders of “alpha males”, The Chad Homicides draws us in to an engaging set of conspiracies loaded with colorful characters,
“God put this drive very strongly inside males so that we can be providers and supporters for more than one woman,” Mr. Trad said.
Nominative determinism strikes again!
the virgin monogamist vs. the Trad bigamist?
[583] Dr. McDermott summarizes the literature demonstrating the effects of the practice of polygyny on women, children and men, and concludes that many negative consequences touch upon each of the groups.
[584] Women in polygynous relationships are at increased risk of mental health problems as a result of higher rates of domestic violence, including sexual abuse, and co-wife conflict. They also tend to fare worse financially.
[585] Children of polygynous unions have worse outcomes than their monogamously born counterparts, as measured in a variety of ways. They face a higher risk of mortality. Young girls are often married to much older men and engage in early sexual behaviour, which has repercussions for their life expectancy and physical well-being. Where girls give birth frequently, shortened inter-birth intervals pose a heightened risk for various problems which can affect both the mother and the child.
[586] As for effects on men, Dr. McDermott notes that polygyny causes the proportion of young unmarried men to be high, up to a ratio of 150 men to 100 women. This leads to a need for a polygynist community (at least a closed one) to excise at least half of the junior boys, the so-called “Lost Boys”. “Junior boys who are thrown out of such societies at much greater rates in order to make a sexually asymmetrical system viable, often receive less education and achieve lower levels of employment, as they are forced onto a society with few skills and no social support” (at para. 33).
[587] Junior males who are unable to find wives represent “a class of largely poor, young, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence” (at para. 34).
2011 BCSC
1588
Reference (re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada)
Call me a Modernist, but this is one aspect of ancient Traditionalism that can be left behind, never to return until either sex or sexual orientation has become far more flexible (under Transhumanism) than it is today.
We’ve got a group that’s too ideology huffed and/or moronic to get rid of the welfare cliff, that wants no caps on lifetime healthcare payouts, that is likely to completely botch a single-payer healthcare rollout and thereby utterly trainfuck almost 1/5th of the US economy, and so on…
And we have a group that is too stupid and/or ideology-huffed to realize that welfare doubles as a form of riot insurance, that can’t get rid of the welfare cliff because they spend their scarce political capital trying to abolish welfare entirely, and which routinely cuts taxes and fails to adequately fund infrastructure in ways that somehow make the entire process more costly.
Overall, this is an obstacle to good policy.
If people in general were somehow able to hold the position that economic growth/efficiency/etc were absolutely vital and also how we can afford to have nice things for our poor, and as such we cannot just encourage people to do whatever they want (and yet should balance that according to actual harms), then we’d see something that was on balance less stupid (IMO).
Doing otherwise is why we have the situation with rising rents because there aren’t enough housing units, because various regulations make it more difficult to build housing units and not just for actual safety reasons, and this is decried as the fault of oppressive white cishet techies somehow.
And like, I’m sure you disagree with my proposal to issue healthcare vouchers, or think a higher minimum wage is preferable to wage subsidies, but I’d imagine you’d take all of that over a ‘solid’ GOP platform without that much hesitation.
you know, a lot of my mutuals deserve to be mutuals with someone far, far better than me
H-hey! Don’t question my credentials as an evil person. I can be a heartless monster, too, you know. A-all sorts of people have said so, like Mr. Remp!
We’ve got a group that’s too ideology huffed and/or moronic to get rid of the welfare cliff, that wants no caps on lifetime healthcare payouts, that is likely to completely botch a single-payer healthcare rollout and thereby utterly trainfuck almost 1/5th of the US economy, and so on…
And we have a group that is too stupid and/or ideology-huffed to realize that welfare doubles as a form of riot insurance, that can’t get rid of the welfare cliff because they spend their scarce political capital trying to abolish welfare entirely, and which routinely cuts taxes and fails to adequately fund infrastructure in ways that somehow make the entire process more costly.
Overall, this is an obstacle to good policy.
If people in general were somehow able to hold the position that economic growth/efficiency/etc were absolutely vital and also how we can afford to have nice things for our poor, and as such we cannot just encourage people to do whatever they want (and yet should balance that according to actual harms), then we’d see something that was on balance less stupid (IMO).
Doing otherwise is why we have the situation with rising rents because there aren’t enough housing units, because various regulations make it more difficult to build housing units and not just for actual safety reasons, and this is decried as the fault of oppressive white cishet techies somehow.
And like, I’m sure you disagree with my proposal to issue healthcare vouchers, or think a higher minimum wage is preferable to wage subsidies, but I’d imagine you’d take all of that over a ‘solid’ GOP platform without that much hesitation.
The proper role of the state, I believe, is most often (though not always) to establish frameworks for private action.
Macro-information vs micro-information. Macro-coordination vs micro-coordination. Flexible hierarchies. Coordination of rules for predictability and thus lowered computational and compliance cost.
Although, if anything, that post about healthcare costs is perhaps a better summary of my current politics than any.
Efficiency - in government, in the private sector, anywhere - doesn’t just mean some nice bonus that lets rich people we don’t care about have more sports cars.
As efficiency and production increase, you stop having to triage. If one unit of sovereign services costs $1.00 to deliver and you have $1.00, then you can purchase only one unit. If one unit of sovereign services costs $0.50, then you can purchase two.
If there were two of you and you collectively only had one dollar to spend, then in the first case you have to fight about who gets that one unit of sovereign services, and in the second case you don’t.
The adequate planning of cities and efficient distribution of resources are absolutely vital. Surplus regulations don’t just have a cost in corporate bureaucrat annoyance, but in bus stops.
Private property, government regulations, wealth redistribution… these are tools, not moral imperatives.
Now I know many people would say “sure, but my politics is about using them correctly as tools,” and for some people that’s true. But a lot of the time that’s not what we see in practice.
So the great question, I think, is how we can make systems of governance better, to promote better and more accurate approaches to policy that more effectively accomplish what will benefit people.
there are those who queer binaries and those who do not queer binaries.
and then there are those for whom you can’t quite tell if they queer binaries or not and it makes you feel funny in a way you haven’t felt before, they are the ones who queer the queer binaries binary.
do you defend the free speech of leftists, antifascists, feminists, queer people, etc?
Yes. On the other hand, do you think that censorship of right wing people is acceptable, or even understandable?
You’re both listening to each other before slandering, misinterpreting, spamming and derailing what the other have to say.
So it’s not really “defending free speech” or “respecting free speech” as much as it is “eagerly waiting for ammunition to prove the other side wrong”.
Technically, free speech lets you say anything you want (so long as it’s not an incitement of violence) and it prevents the government from intervening. It doesn’t prevent the angry black neighbor from next door kicking the shit out of them for being racist, even if the neighbor is willing to risk getting arrested for beating the shit out of them.
I don’t really care if two sides have a ferocious verbal shitslinging match, provided it doesn’t get violent or incite violence, I’m fine with it. Even if they are nasty pricks, there’s an audience waiting to hand out consequences for being shit human beings. Charlottesville was case in point for that even before the violence started.
Free speech laws don’t have a direct relationship with assault laws. I can’t imagine that the law will be kind to your hypothetical angry Black man from next door kicking the shit out of someone, regardless of that someone’s racial opinions.
Consider https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words#United_States and note that in important fighting words case, Chaplinsky vs New Hampshire, some of the words in question were calling someone a Facist. This was upheld as counting as fighting words.
Please also note Cohen vs California, where wearing a jacket reading “Fuck the Draft” in a court house was judged to not be fighting words, as it was not reasonable for anybody who was or who reasonably might be present to understand it as a personal insult. Presumably, wearing a t-shirt reading “Fuck Bob Bobson” in the presence of Bob Bobson would still count as fighting words.
Please also compare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul where literally burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family was the act in question. The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the conviction under a city Bias-motivated Crime ordinance, saying, “it (the city of Saint Paul) has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas… St. Paul has no such authority to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow Marquess of Queensberry rules… Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone’s front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.”
I don’t know why you wasted your time writing this when my entire point is that the guy kicking in the door is doing something illegal as a consequence of someone’s entirely legal free speech. Freedom of speech =/= freedom from consequence. It not being legal doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen and I never so much as implied the judge would be kind to law breakers or that there’d be an excuse in sentencing for it. I don’t really need to note anything when nothing you’ve written is of any relevance to my point.
Huh, I’ve become used to “consequences for speech” being essentially meaning; *taps club threateningly* “there will be consequences for saying that” with complete endorsement of the morality of beating and killing people for their speech, and an implication that it is immoral that the government would object to that.
The “consequence” is getting assaulted. Which, ok, the consequence of yelling at the next car over in traffic might be getting shot in the head in a road rage incident, or the consequence of getting drunk at a frat party might involve getting raped, but you phrase it like that, *shrug* “actions have consequences” and you will be pilloried as a victim blaming jackass who is justifying murder and rape, respectively.
Ah yes, the extremely pro gay Communists. The Communist utopia where LGBTQ people will frolick in fields of wild flowers or whatever. Yup, those Communists. Definitely not the ones who think that homosexuality is bourgeois degeneracy or Facism itself.
Actually, I did enjoy FO4 and especially enjoyed FO3. This whole business about how they’re terrible and New Vegas is godlike is just a meme. NV is good, sure, but this stuff is just performative hatred.
I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen any critique of the current push for same sex marriage based on the fact that every large corporation in Australia is explicitly supporting it, and in some cases donating heavily.
It’s a way for corporations to deflect and calm leftist sentiments without harming the bottom line (much).
gaystralians: able to conspicuously delay getting married just like straightalians
These were the original policy positions of the Argumate Party when it was founded in 2017. None foresaw that it would eventually lead to the literal breakaway of Western Australia, in one of few recorded uses of nuclear weapons for civil engineering in history.
i'm starting to think universla basic income for is not perfect, but could really help. for example, victims of abuse, at home, in jobs etc would have some means at least to get out when they know it's time
right, it’s not a panacea, but it helps to put a floor on exactly how terrible things can get.
Now, I suspect that we disagree a lot more on the object-level recommendations of how to achieve this (but I’m not actually sure about this given how cryptographically secure your politics are), but the general shape of what you describe is entirely compatible with the whole neoreactionary project.
I mean, I don’t really think I’ve been especially cryptic, particularly in policy recommendations. And while Outer Hong Kong is structured as corporation, it’s more of a consumer cooperative, not something Moldbug would dream up of Fnargl mining the Earth, and I’m hardly saying one should create such a thing, merely that they could.
It may be that I see some of these object-level disagreements as a far more unbridgeable gulf between those who call themselves Neoreactionaries and myself. I certainly feel they’re optimizing for something other than what I’m optimizing for, and sometimes becoming dangerously racist or uselessly sexist.
Perhaps it appears more cryptic because I believe there can be no instantiated pure form of National Technocracy. Once invented, if adopted, it must be adapted to the needs, capabilities, and culture of each country to which it is applied.
(Though even that modern example has had its risks - there is some worry that with LKY no longer at the helm, there may have been mismanagement of government funds at the very top.)
regular reminder that some people allege mismanagement of government funds going back decades, with Singapore’s pension fund having far less assets than it should based on the returns that it claims to have achieved.
Honestly, I believe the decision to put them into a state fund instead of having options for a number of state-approved funds was a mistake.
There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too. Does it not backfire for them? Why do right-wingers get a pass?”
And, in fact, it does backfire for them. It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars. Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment. It’s a price paid in National Will.
What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War? What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on? There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.
How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?
To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control. One must be worthy.
The Right, in many ways, has not been. And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.
All this talk of “becoming worthy” makes you sound like NRx, my bro.
If I recall correctly (and I may not), one of the most famous emperors of China used deception and murder to achieve his rule - but under him, the people and the Empire prospered.
Less dramatically, and far more modern, Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party have used lawsuits and other means to suppress their political opposition. But what have they achieved? Did they exercise virtue in statecraft? Did the people under their rule prosper?
(Though even that modern example has had its risks - there is some worry that with LKY no longer at the helm, there may have been mismanagement of government funds at the very top.)
Not only must the people be worthy, but the structure and ideology must be worthy, too. Systems, interlocking, that must find those who are worthy and elevate them, reward virtue, and minimize vice.
The Neoreactionaries are wrong, though that does not mean their opponents are right.
There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too. Does it not backfire for them? Why do right-wingers get a pass?”
And, in fact, it does backfire for them. It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars. Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment. It’s a price paid in National Will.
What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War? What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on? There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.
How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?
To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control. One must be worthy.
The Right, in many ways, has not been. And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.
What did the Nazis do for eugenics?
They utterly destroyed its public legitimacy until the present day.
Now, some people might say “but what if they won?”, but a lot of why they sucked had to do with what made them Nazis. Generic renegade German Ultranationalists waging a war of conquest might have been bad by many standards, but they would not have been as bad as the Nazis - and they would have wasted fewer resources on genocidal extermination.
What have Stalin and Mao done for Communism? What was won with blood was stripped away.
And yes, sometimes you can get away with it. Force is a real and basic nature of this world. Sometimes you can have such overwhelming power that you can seize a whole continent and reduce the original natives, and their petty wars with each other, to a marginal force or even a distant memory.
But then, what happens afterwards? In ten years? In one hundred or two hundred or more?
There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too. Does it not backfire for them? Why do right-wingers get a pass?”
And, in fact, it does backfire for them. It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars. Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment. It’s a price paid in National Will.
What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War? What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on? There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.
How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?
To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control. One must be worthy.
The Right, in many ways, has not been. And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.
argh my dad believes the parties never switched and also hitler was a leftist
Well, the parties switched plenty of times in the past, but Hilter was a socialist. Like he’s the best example that ‘working for the common good’ doesn’t mean you can’t be evil. He was working for the common good! of those he considered to be human. Which wasn’t most people.
Or maybe he’s a good example of ‘politics is more messy than left/right’.
A defining characteristic of the left is working towards a bigger government. It’s pretty much what originally separated the left and the right. Any authoritarian regime, be it fascist or communist or something else, is inherently left-leaning on at least one of the political axes
Explain the following policies backed pretty much exclusively by right wingers in the modern day:
1. The government getting involved in whether women can have abortions
2. The government getting involved in whether gay people can marry
3. The government getting involved in what bathroom trans people go to
4. The war on drugs
These sure sound like bigger government things to me
It turns out that no one actually supports smaller government.
So McD’s increases employee wages 10% and the move leads to massive unemployment, forces restaurants to close, & bankrupts the company the first sales gains in over two years for the chain!
Almost like treating your employees like human beings mean they treat their customers better and the customers notice or something.
Hmm.
Almost like the easing of financial desperation makes you happier overall, causing you to have more energy at work and to pass the happiness along to others, including customers.
Can you imagine?
no one is against giving people slight pay increases. people are against giving people a high pay rate ($15) for (what is generally considered) “unskilled” labor.
a large amount of people are not just against giving people pay increases, but they successfully lobby against them even having any form of leverage to ask for these experiences. there is a strong movement to get rid of the minimum wage so that anyone can decrease their laborer’s wages down to $0 and “”””experience““”“
Eh? Is that a thing in Russia? Because I’ve only heard of AnCap and Libertarian types arguing for the abolition of the minimum wage in America, and their movements are not really all that strong.
No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.
In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.
Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by
the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product
of deindustrialization.
What I mean is that in manufacturing,
facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your
bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs
are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.
Contrast this with sales occupations. In
these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great
food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products
won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.
(Finance is a mix of these. In trading
and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard
facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however,
bullshit works.)
Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift
from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in
respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however
ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked –
29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions
more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute
facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus
inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in
manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.
Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.
I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.
I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.
However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.
No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.
In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.
In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.
I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.
“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.
“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.
It had a lot of bite, anyway.
There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”
I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.
