What happens if people can’t own nations?

What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?

I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.

Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.

However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.

Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.

Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).

But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?

Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.

Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?

All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.

But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.

And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.

Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.

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rtrixie

mitigatedchaos

The Libs have confused Nationalism for a disease because they witnessed auto-immune dysfunction, but once a nation falls below a certain level of Nationalism, it is indeed difficult to raise an army for its defense.

Nationalism is not yet dead in the United States, but it is aspirationally among much of the Left/Libs.

nationalism politics

mitigatedchaos

Anonymous asked:

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.

mitigatedchaos answered:

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.

mitigatedchaos

Anything that promotes cultural unity over cultural diversity, even shared experiences, heads in the direction of ethnonationalism, even if it may be far from reaching it. Having one shared language, or having a required period of civil or military service, head in that direction. Even soft unifying forces such as television can count, without any force of arms in backing.

Cultures have more than one layer. American food court multiculturalism, in which deep differences are stripped away while surface differences, like cooking, remain, moves positively along the axis of ethnonationalism, even though many people will object that “American” is not ethnicity.

A theoretical total cosmopolity, in its maximal diversity, has one language for each inhabitant. A theoretical total ethnopolity borders on hivemind.

nationalism politics flagpost

A Price Paid in National Will

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.)

politics flagpost national technocracy

I’m still puzzled by those on the Left who don’t understand the rise in White Nationalism.

What exactly did they expect when they were cheering on “demographic destiny”? When their ideology required them to excuse terror attacks and look away from mass sex crimes? When the rurals were thrown under the bus in favor of corporations and globalization? When governing in the national interests went from an unspoken assumption to ‘chauvinism’? When the woman accompanying Charles Murray went to the hospital after the no-platforming to check on her injuries? When a foreign ideology hostile to LGBTs was excused from all criticism because of the race of who practiced it?

Will it be any mystery if Asians leave the coalition over getting smacked by Affirmative Action? Will it be any mystery if Blacks leave the coalition because tighter immigration restrictions make it easier for them to get jobs, and school vouchers make it possible to send their children to schools with problem students filtered out? Will it be any mystery if those who immigrated legally leave the coalition because it undermines what they managed to do? If centrists leave because of the support for open borders?

There is one movement that will never make white men its enemy and will never attempt to replace them. And they’re flowing towards it and its potential for ultraviolence, while it’s being cheered on by people who should know better.

The potential for damage, including to people who had no part in this, is catastrophic. How can they be demobilized by people that have nothing to offer them? Who are themselves hypocritical sexists and racists? Who excuse the same actions they condemn them for?

I liked pretending the cracks in Liberalism didn’t exist, but, collectively, that might have allowed the situation to get this far.

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For those who haven’t been reading my blog long enough to know this:

One of my goals is to invent a new form of Nationalism, adapted to the 21st century, powered by new organizational and information technologies.

Not a racial nationalism, nor what people have in mind with an ethnic one, but a kind of National Technocracy, where the nation is ruled effectively by true experts - not merely the credentialed - for the benefit of its citizens, selected through new forms of republic or democracy.

This is unrealistic, I admit, but then so was the last election, and I can feel how the Overton Window has opened up, and maybe some fragment of it will fall to Earth and improve something, somewhere.

nationalism victory for national technocracy politics

mitigatedchaos

The existence of immune system overreactions does not mean that immune systems are a bad thing.

mitigatedchaos

@flowingblades

I mean, I agree, but also “immune systems” are bad wrt nationalism. A country is not an organism. A body needs to keep the body safe; a culture does not need to keep itself safe, rather it needs to keep the people in it safe.

The culture doesn’t need to be preserved if “culture” is just hot dogs vs sushi, ballet vs rap, basketball vs rugby. In other words, if it’s just aesthetics. Falling below a certain level of Nationalism makes it infeasible to field an army - but fielding an army to defend sushi would indeed be overkill. However…

Consider FGM. We now have it in Michigan, apparently. For now, it’s still considered a criminal activity. But what happens when 5% of the population supports it? 10%? 15%? Eventually, it becomes more normalized and the political will to legalize it will materialize and be captured by some political party. FGM is actively harmful and unironically bad.
However, that still only affects one group. What about long runs of repeated first cousin marriage? That’s a cultural thing, and the effects stack the longer it goes on, putting a disproportionate burden on the healthcare system.
But even then, you could hypothetically force the entire medical system to be ‘free market’ to make individuals pay for the burden of that instead. So let’s step it up again. What about who deserves the fruit of the economy? Is the society individualist or collectivist? Should we help each other or is it smart to screw each other over at the earliest opportunity? Differences on this matter impact the political will to perform redistribution - either with no redistribution, some redistribution, or proceeding to Venezuela-tier “bordering on a failed state” botched Socialism. That has a HUGE effect.
What religion should be the dominant one, and should it have control over what to do with heretics and “degenerates”? You know, like LGBT people are considered in some countries and territories, like, say, Chechnya.

Ultimately, culture is not actually individual and not actually escapable at the national level. To keep the people safe, it is actually necessary to keep the culture some level of safe, particularly if that culture involves not becoming Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.

nationalism politics

For the record, my conception of Nationalism is multiracial, rooted in a group identity based on culture, ideology, and reciprocal loyalty rather than race.

Each nation has a different immigration policy best suited to it. I don’t consider the racism in various nations good, even if I think restrictive immigration policy is suitable for that country.

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collapsedsquid

foreignpolicy.com

Surprise Findings: China’s Youth Are Getting Less Nationalistic, Not More

Harvard and Peking University researchers just upended conventional wisdom.

collapsedsquid

Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment: “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their government even when it is wrong.”
The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time. On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to 2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved significantly over the survey period.
The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism; they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after 1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the proportion of youth who felt that way.

While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking. Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?

mitigatedchaos

As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it. But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either. Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.

For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian. In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.

politics nationalism

Anonymous asked:

Do you honestly think there's any chance that your very intellectual approach to politics will ever translate into a movement radical enough to mobilize people to implement it?

“Very intellectual”

Heh.

Could someone start a knock-off of Singapore’s People’s Action Party and get any seats for it?

Not under the current electoral system in America, though we see elements, bits and pieces can sometimes get through, such as Maine adopting a kind of preference voting for the governor’s seat.

The polarization into two parties is the natural state of the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system - you want exactly 51% of the vote in order to have the minimum amount of compromise. This creates a lot of dumb politics.

There is, after all, no place for me in the Republican Party, nor in the Democratic Party.

However, while a unified party powerful enough to take power may not emerge, some ideas, elements, and legislative reforms could get through. And if there are subtle changes to the system, then a more unified platform could become viable.

Some of these elements which escape to be adopted by others may be ideological in nature. Some of my posts on Nationalism have caused some local Rationalists to scratch their heads, wondering “wait, why isn’t that the argument actual American nationalists, in the form of the GOP, actually make?” Or otherwise they simply have never been exposed to an argument for Nationalism that is more than performative flag-waving, by the kind of person who believes that nations are both real and fake at the same time, that can see them as constructs, but still considers them desirable. Also, many may not have been exposed to the idea that open borders may be a pathway to an incompetent yet oppressive world government (gradually, over time).

Likewise, in constructing a kind of Social Centrism, most people do not currently have access to arguments against the most liberal positions (on e.g., polygamy) that are rooted in secular considerations and which also take in mind future developments (e.g., Transhumanism).

There is a question - when GOP members exit their current ideological basis, what will they exit to?

By making these arguments, which then are shared, I create a more defensible ideological position of retreat other than just crossing over entirely to the other side.

The ideal body for my politics right now, given conditions, would be a think tank that could conduct research and produce ready-to-sign legislation along pathways that the existing political parties are not currently setup to defend against (insufficient pre-built memetic barriers - battles they don’t even realize they are or will be fighting). This does not require a mass movement, but rather a fairly good-sized chunk of funding and a core of intelligent and motivated contributors.

On a more mass basis, once a more clear ideology is produced, I think it can be simplified in a way that is more easily communicated…

…though that may still have issues generating sufficient excitement.

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ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.