in the past I kind of dissed Greg Egan for overlooking the possibility of Islamic terrorism, but his (fictional) predictions of resurgent Aryan Nationalist groups in the near future seem increasingly reasonable, even if he didn’t quite get the memetic background entirely right, focusing more on a kind of New Age woo than the clusterfuck of retreads from the 1930s mixed with Pepe memes that we actually ended up with.
one of the things that does feel very real is the concept of “science” treated as a political football getting kicked around by nominally leftist and rightist groups whose connection to reality grows ever more tenuous
Well, when you combine people getting excited about demographic replacement with people who still pretty unapologetically believe in Collective Ethnic Intergenerational Justice, then of course ethnic majority ethnic nationalism is going to rise.
If you got dudes talking like they’re going to take ‘revenge’ for stuff that happened decades or even centuries ago, well, that’s the basis of a lot of “ethnic tension” and ethnic violence.
another prediction was that widespread genetic testing would end up getting picked up by ethnoracial nationalists as an ironclad way of determining group membership, particularly focused on Y chromosome inheritance, thus you’re either a descendant of the historical Father of the People or the interloping usurper descendant of some barbarian rapist; thankfully that idea hasn’t got off the ground yet
We’ll have genetic engineering by the time it would have taken off, I think, which is going to weird effects on the whole race politics thing.
Hopefully good ones. If we’re lucky (and we might actually be in this one particular case), we may be able to patch the genes of adults, too.