mitigatedchaos

Still, I suppose I can add “accused of being Mencius Moldbug” (though it was very probably a shitpost) to the List, along with “labeled ‘faux Asian nationalist political thinker’,” “suggested should work at a think tank,” and a few other things.

The thing about Neoreaction is that Gnon doesn’t care about you, either, and neither did it care about species throughout history that have gone extinct - and what we want is survival and prosperity for ourselves, not to be subject to outrageous Fortune. And Fnargl? There’s no reason for him not to overwrite your mind with his superior technology or just replace you with a robot.

Neoreaction is not positioned to account for Transhumanism, among other things. As such, it’s a dead end.

Any overlap I have with Neoreactionary thought is largely incidental. I don’t really interact with them, nor read them.

I’m not a dark angel cast out of Gnon’s heaven to dwell among the mortal Liberals and spread the heretical gospels of Dark Enlightenment™. I’m surfing a wave seeking a better future, looking to synthesize a new, upwards axis.

politics

argumate

theaudientvoid:

Every nation longs to be an empire. Every culture has tried to force itself on the unwilling at one point or another. What is the statute of limitations on imperialism? Are there varying legally distinct degrees, like with murder versus manslaughter, and murder one versus murder two? Who among us shall pass judgement, when everyone is guilty if you only go back far enough? And who is in a position to carry out the sentence, but another empire in its own right?

And more importantly, who among us can ask rhetorical questions? :)

I think “Japan” as a nation and culture got off lightly; the emperor was retained, as was the flag and other symbolism. Because it’s an island nation, the borders remained unchanged besides the loss of overseas colonies, which European empires also lost shortly afterwards anyway.

But the opposition to cultural appropriation that spawned this thread is mostly coming from young Japanese-Americans, not older Japanese nationals, and is driven by American/Western political concerns in the first place, which leads to an amusing clusterfuck of intersecting memes; for example:

- The idea that only “pure” Japanese people can ever wear a kimono, which sounds awfully like something you would hear in the 1930s.

- The idea that wearing a kimono will offend Japanese people, when in practice it’s more likely to offend Chinese people as a reminder of Japanese imperialism!

- Referring to Japan in the context of decolonisation, when Japan was an actual colonising nation and was never occupied by Western nations until after WWII.

- Many Japanese people teach classes in traditional arts of tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the rest. I’m sure they would be absolutely thrilled if all their customers stayed away for fear of appropriating their culture.

Anyway, activists gonna act; it could be worse.

mitigatedchaos

As someone with, hm, let’s say historical ties to both Britain and Japan, I, for one, welcome their defense of the Britain of the East.

Just kidding, this is probably going to get me in trouble.

Actually I’d like the kimono industry to stay afloat as its customer base has been shrinking, and that means selling to nerds in America. They want to do it. The Japanese who live in Japan think it’s okay. First-generation immigrants think it’s okay. And if anyone owns the cultural rights to Japanese culture, then surely it must be Japanese people who live in Japan.

I mean heck, look at all the stuff they deliberately export to us! The government WANTS to export Japanese culture in order to gain soft power! (And more shitpostfully, importing exported Japanese culture is a long-standing European cultural tradition going back hundreds of years.)

A number (though not all) of the people criticizing are not only not Japanese born in Japan, not nisei born of first-generation Japanese immigrants in America, they are other kinds of Asians by ancestry, some of them mixed, or else just plain old White People™.

And, like, the Japanese would likely actually object to the idea that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese own the cultural rights to Japanese culture. That is probably like seven different flavors of problematic.

Probably this relates to how Japan became the Default Asian Culture in the eyes of the West, which… in some ways it kinda was before, but also China could have become that in this century if it didn’t go Communist.

Anyhow, these dust-ups are really about racial and ethnic identity in America. It’s true that people still make fun of Asians, because children are cruel and commit status war and looks are easy to attack. Also, having a sanctioned monopoly on some kind of foreign culture is important to have power under identity politics, like the legitimacy of royalty.

However, it’s also possible that if the rate of mixture increased, eventually people would forget their lineages, much like Italians and Irish forgot who they “were” and became “white.” The question is whether the visual difference is an insurmountable barrier. If I were the Republican Party, I’d be asking myself if there were some way I could cause this forgetting of lineage on purpose.

Britain of the East racepol

ranma-official

The perfect metaphor

millievfence

K comments on a slate star codex post about the curious way people react to failing rebreathers. Deep divers use a rebreather rather than just an oxygen tank, because it decouples length of dive from amount you have to carry. Rebreathers can fail; that’s okay, you bring an emergency oxygen tank with you, enough to get back to the surface. The problem is noticing; oxygen deprivation is hard to notice because noticing requires oxygen. So they put a monitor in that beeps at you if the oxygen content of the air gets low and you need to switch to your emergency tank.

All your incentives are aligned here. You want oxygen. You have a source of oxygen. You have a clear signal as to when you need to switch. Switching is not hard, you just need to swap your mouth pieces. And yet, people are horrible at this. They panic and in their panic they can’t detach from the thing that has been your source of air, even if intellectually they know it is no longer a good source of air.

Some people do this even when they are on land in a room full of normal air when they knew they’s need to switch at some point. It is just too hard.

This is a great metaphor for anxiety. Even if you intellectually know the cause of your stress it can feel too dangerous to separate from it long enough to introduce a healthier replacement. You have to get the rebreather working first, and then you can switch sources. It is related to but not quite the same as a sick system, although I can’t quite articulate the difference.

So “clinging to the rebreather” is a thing now, please introduce it to your lexicon

Source: millievfence

flakmaniak

the-grey-tribe

But to say, as Sarah Champion did, that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” is either saying that Pakistanis are more likely to rape and more likely to rape white girls, or that the rape of white girls is more of a problem than the rape of, for example, white boys or brown girls.

– Chi Onwurah

Worst take on Rotherham yet. Seriously.

flakmaniak

Isn’t it… Literally true that British Pakistani immigrant men disproportionately rape white girls? Isn’t that a large part of the Rotherham scandal, that this is widespread and well above the base rate? So yeah, people are saying it is more likely. Because it literally is.

Now, if people are saying “therefore we should treat this subgroup with extra suspicion”, sure, you can object to that. Presumably a bunch of Rotherham-complainers are doing exactly that, and they shouldn’t.

But what makes the Rotherham scandal special is not that one subgroup committed a pile of crimes at a rate disproportionate to the population at large. The usual “treat people as individuals” liberal rhetoric is well-equipped to handle such cases and maintain social harmony while prosecuting offenders.

No, it’s that people didn’t treat them the same way. They literally discriminated, but the other way, letting minority groups get away with much more. It’s really hollow to try to dismiss the Rotherham scandal by saying “You can’t treat people differently based on their ethnicity/country of origin!” when the entire problem is that people did exactly that. If the relevant authorities had treated people the same regardless of ethnicity and national origin, Rotherham wouldn’t be nearly so big a scandal.

When I first heard about Rotherham, I was bracing for it to be yet another instance of conservatives claiming “PC culture means you can’t call out minorities who actually commit crimes!” without much basis. But then they had an actual example of just that, and a really grotesque one, too. Maybe all their other talking points and examples are shit, but this one isn’t. Haven’t seen anyone debunk it. People who support the culture that produced this trainwreck need to explain how this type of failure can be prevented under their frameworks. If parts of the progressive agenda are at fault for this, then we need to cut those parts out. I don’t believe that attacking racism has to involve letting rape gangs slide. If I thought that, I’d be a lot more conservative than I am.

And if I thought preventing these types of things required keeping out immigrants of certain nationalities, again, I would be a lot more conservative than I am. But as @mitigatedchaos says, you need the will to actually enforce your culture at times, if you want a liberal society that functions correctly. If there is a cultural cause of these rape gangs, then it must be stamped out. The left loves to fight the culture war; they should enjoy fighting this battle of it, too. “Respecting culture” has always been a lie; we have always judged and will always judge the merits of various cultural pieces, just as the left constantly attacks (often rightly!) the culture of conservative Christians. Feminists should be lining up to condemn the rape culture at work here. It seems in their wheelhouse.

Once more, if I believed that culture war tools were insufficient to fight this battle, I would be a lot more reactionary than I am. But I believe that we can change cultures, and yeah, you can call it “imposing our will on minorities” if you wanna make it sound ominous, but that’s kind of what society does. We can and should have broad, consensus standards for behavior. It doesn’t work if murder being okay is just a matter of opinion and cultural difference. If the “murder is okay” people are to coexist with me, they should be on the other side of the globe, in some other society where I don’t have to ever meet them.

Regarding the original quote: I wouldn’t put it as “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”. I would say: “Britain has a problem with British authorities too chickenshit to go after rape gangs because they happen to be a minority ethnicity, and they fear being called racist more than they fear child sex trafficking.” Or perhaps it wasn’t fear of being called racist; perhaps they simply didn’t have the resolve to wield the iron hand of the state in communities not culturally similar to them. But that is their responsibility, to intervene fairly and consistently. (A third option is that they dismissed the allegations as racist, and so didn’t act. That also condemns them, albeit in a slightly different way.)

Whatever the answer, something’s wrong.

Much though it pains me to say it, the conservatives have a point, and it has to be addressed.

mitigatedchaos

In the end, I did become more right wing, not because I think it’s mechanically impossible for the modern left of center to use the tools, but rather because I don’t believe they will have the will to do so unless they are forced to.

To unlock that capability, that willpower to acknowledge that there is actually a problem, which is so unwoke (they’ll defend Islam and Muslims even over other “religions of color”), they ultimately must be threatened with cultural displacement and made to compete.

Source: the-grey-tribe politics

argumate

America has Donald Trump, Britain has Nigel Farage, and Australia has the one and only Pauline Hanson, a fiery redhead who rose to prominence in politics twenty years ago (back when a very different Hanson sung MMMbop).

She gave fiery diatribes about deporting all the Asians and dodged accusations of xenophobia by honestly not knowing the meaning of the word, all until she was voted out and briefly jailed for fraud.

Now she’s back! And she… hasn’t changed a bit actually, except the Chinese community can breathe easily knowing the Muslims are going to be taking the bulk of her attention for the time being.

Of all the media franchises we had to reboot in 2k16, why this one.

argumate

and now she’s after autistic kids because hey why not.

mitigatedchaos

I, for one, would welcome Australia being ruled by an Asian lesbian cyborg.

Though admittedly that isn’t a very controversial opinion on Tumblr.

shtpost at least I think this is the one with the ghostwriter scandal

sinesalvatorem

gamsee

today this white girl asked me why my hair is so curly and i said im black and she told me to say african american

mitigatedchaos

You hear about this happening in Britain with tourists sometimes, but I’m not sure if it really happens there or if the Brits are just yanking our chains.

Source: gamsee race politics

altrightbot

2061: after president zuckerberg hands over the location and biometric info of faithbook users suspected of having illegal opinions, the union of european (purely geographical term) council republics dispatches the third tank division “jean claude-juncker” and the open society commissariate to prevent countless islamophobic incidents. bereaved family members weigh the loss of their radicalized right-wing high school children against the fact they don’t have to exchange currencies at the breadlines in neighboring EU republics and come to some closure.

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

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The perfect metaphor

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