garmbreak1 asked:
Woman tears down Confederate flag in South Carolina (2015)
(For my part, I thought no serious charges or punishments were warranted.)
What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.
Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized
electoral politics.
Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.
Anonymous asked:
mitigatedchaos answered:
“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.
If you are concerned about the polity in a multi-racial society breaking up into a number of racially-aligned parties, then isn’t the two-party system we have in the United States a good idea?
A good question, but is it better to have one “White Party” and one “Everyone Else Party”?
Or one “White + Asian Party” and one “Everyone Else Party”?
The real answer, I think, is to knock it the fuck off and realize that Melting Pot + Civic Nationalism is the superior model for racial harmony vs. SJ and its subtextual ethnonationalism and racial intellectual property rights.
rocketverliden asked:
Nah, actually I was thinking that there are lots of other southerners we could choose from for replacement statues, specifically ones that weren’t all “rah rah slavery” and so on. Some of them could be a lot more modern, others from before the war, and so on. U.S. founding fathers from those states would be the ideal option for many of them - it reaffirms membership in the US, still has lots of historical weight, and so on.
They shouldn’t be more black than the proportional share of the population, though.
The goal here is to provide an alternative, positive regional identity for the white southerners that is not rooted in the racism inherent to the Confederacy. (And the racism was inherent - at least one governor or whatever went on about how yeah, this was about slavery, and yeah, this was about “the inferiority of the negro race” and so on.)
History is big. There is a lot that can be chosen from when we decide what to emphasize. There are many people, with many stories. With this, we could step sideways.
(The exception is generic confederate soldier statues, which should stay. After all, the side that wins the war usually thinks it’s the ethical side, since most factions fighting a war think they’re the ethical side, so removing them just means legitimizing the idea of removing monuments to soldiers of losing sides in general.)
However, I don’t think the capital-L Left, in broad strokes, wants the southern whites to have a positive southern identity. I think it wants to crush them in order to celebrate itself and its righteousness.
It doesn’t like the founding fathers, either. It doesn’t like the United States of America.
It could celebrate the power of the very ideals this nation’s founders espoused as the source of some of the very power that overturned the cruelty they allowed at this nation’s founding. But most of those people were white men, so they won’t.
Also, when it comes to race and politics in this country, I would like to point out that we have not tried having social policy that does not actually suck.
Self reblogging to add a thing I found:
http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/
The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.
For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.
@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?
A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.
The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.
THIS ARTICLE HAS TEETH
I WANT ANTI RACISM DOG BACK
fuck twitter Im going to go delete mine
useless piece of shit it is
Ngl, this makes me feel a lot better about the ridiculous amount of time I spend tryin to counter racist bullshit in comments sections.
Bark at racists online 2k17
This is amazing. I want something like this, but it barks completely at random, and when you reply to it, somebody else automatically berates you for not listening to it and believing properly.
Maybe this has already happened.
The obvious exploit here is to accuse anti-racism-dog of classism/sexism/antisemitism/ageism/ableism or literally anything else. Anti-semitism-dog cannot defend itself.
Maybe do it in a friendly-reminder-callout-uwu way and let people know that the guy behing anti-racism-dog is 41 years old, has poor grooming, jerks off to anime titties, ships two underage characters, or draws problematic fanart.
If anti-racism-dog works, it will make the discourse worse, give its enemies ammunition, and eventually eat itself.
If it does not work, all it does is signal boost and shametweet people on twitter, use its follower base to incite harassment against its targets, embroils its follower base in exactly the kind of argument they want to avoid, and make their enemies look sane in comparison.
Dear OP,
My assessment of the validity of online racism accusations has just decreased. Again. If it keeps getting worse because of people like OP and that twitter account, it may eventually flip negative.
That is a bad thing, OP. Literal Richard Spencer himself said that he can openly call himself a Nazi because so many people throw around the term willy-nilly that no one thinks it means real Nazis anymore. Abusing terms destroys them. Some of those terms actually have value.
One antibiotic resistant super-bacteria has already been created. And by that, I mean that an Orange Internet Meme has been elected President.
These actions have consequences.
Sincerely,
Mitigated Chaos
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
luckily policy success or failure has no relation to politics anyway
This will sound weird, but a lot of Trumpers don’t actually care about the wall, per se.
The Trump administration is looking to reduce and change legal immigration, in some ways making it more like it has been previously or like other countries. (Immigration levels have not always been this high in America.)
This makes a lot of sense from a “keep Republicans able to get elected over the next five decades” perspective, as, as we all know, Republican outreach to other minority races has mostly flopped. Also, views change the more generations that immigrants are in the country. (I talk about them flipping the Asians, but it’s a bit harder than flipping the Irish since there is a greater visual difference with whites, and so there are limits to how far racism will dissolve.)
The Democrats were celebrating an inevitable demographic tide that would deliver them permanent electoral majority. However, that tide is not actually inevitable. On some level, Trumpers can probably sense that the plan is to replace or outnumber them, but America does have immigration as part of its national mythos so this is not as well-supported.
The Wall is, to a degree, just a hammy metaphor for actually enforcing immigration law, and to a lesser degree, changing immigration rules. If he changes immigration / enforces immigration law in other ways, his voters will be satisfied even without him actually building it.
During the Second World War, the Japanese Canadian population of coastal British Columbia was divided and resettled across the Canadian interior.
The Japanese Canadians did not concentrate anywhere. There were no resettled communities, only families and individuals. They did not live close to one another. They did not make new communities, out of a fear that they might once again become public enemies.
A few thousand left for Japan after the war was over. Those who stayed in Canada did not usually return to their homes in the Pacific exclusion area, which had been sold by civilian authorities at a profit.
The resettled families did not keep their language. They did not keep their culture. They kept friends among themselves, but they did not do it in public, and they did not pass it on to their children. Their children went to Anglophone schools. They made Anglophone friends.
And as the older generation died, it forgot. Their children grew up in a community that was not their own. But, for those children, it was different. This was their home now. This was their community.
Almost. They felt apart from it, somehow. Sometimes, by a word or a look, they felt as though they did not belong. They felt as though there was something missing. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know where they had come from. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know who they were.
They felt as though their parents had taken something from them. They had done it out of fear, or out of hope. The children had not understood what they were missing. Their parents understood it much too well.
As adults, they talked to one another, those with the same skin, with the same names, about that feeling of absence. Not often, but sometimes.
But they forgot those feelings, and those moments, most of the time. They lived and worked in a world that told them this was their community, and these were their people, and this was where they belonged.
Until it isn’t.
Until, suddenly, they remember.
Doesn’t this suggest Ethnic Nationalism, though?
Honestly if the Indian government buying the bullet train off of the Japanese in the hopes it repeats its zero-accident track record in Delhi isn’t the most ingenious experiment in human biodiversity theory, please find me a better one.
Wait until Dinesh decides the bolts don’t really need to be screwed on as tight as Takashi told him and we’ll see if they match that record.
Bro, m8, buddy, pal,
We don’t have a non-corrupt India with which to separate out biological factors, including environmental ones (such as poor nutrition), so “does India fuck up the bullet train” does not work as an experiment for your hypothesis.
You’re not dealing any more in the scientific method than I am. You hazard to bet the fact that bullet trains won’t work in India is down to something intangible like “corruption” and I’m suggesting it’s got more to do with human capital.
People who shit in the street and ride on the top of freight trains aren’t doing so because of poor nutrition, fam.
But they might out of cultural factors. (Also, poor nutrition, in the aggregate, could harm national IQ and mental health, among other things.)
Corruption is a norm, it can be removed (Singapore) by sufficiently-determined group of actors passing and enforcing the right laws.
The trick is that it’s based on expectations about others engaging in corruption and expectations of getting caught. It also arises when it’s impossible to function without violating the rules.
When corruption rates are high, there is not only a social expectation that one will get away with it, but there’s also the effect of “but everyone else is doing it - why do they get to benefit, but not me?” Additionally, there are networks of corruption that can be relied on.
Increasing the odds of getting caught and punished above a certain level eradicates the pro-corruption network effects. (This could be achieved with a series of sting operations all unleashed at once as a form of shock therapy.) At that point, corrupt officials become isolated individuals with far less expectation of getting away with it.
After a while, the next generation of bureaucrats rises in which the default is that corruption is almost unthinkable, and the relative rarity at that point makes it much less costly to police.
Under Communism, because it’s so at odds with reality, arresting the corrupt officials won’t work as well because they may have to lie and be corrupt to survive, normalizing corruption. Similarly, some cultures with a strong external locus of control or other elements may be prone to corruption.
hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people
…I
OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.
But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently.
Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)
More seriously, while being racist towards white people is bad on its own merits, either as a violation of justice - judging someone for the actions of another - or on more Utilitarian grounds, most of the people that are seriously racist against the whities aren’t going to accept those arguments.
Thus the appeal to something they might actually care about.
It’s possible to create political will out of thin air, but a lot of the time it’s in reaction to historical or material factors, and political will with those factors will have deeper roots.
It’s important to realize along with this, that most politics will occur around the margins - whether groups of white supremacists are growing or shrinking, whether swing voters shift from one party to another, and so on. Strong believers do have an effect, but it’s necessary to have raw power mass at your disposal.
As such, the question is not about “but if we be nice to our rivals, they will still be maximally evil,” but about “what’s the marginal rate that people will enter or leave our enemy’s coalition?”
Now that doesn’t mean playing along nicely all the time, but for goodness sake people should be very careful and specific in who they are targetting, and most racism is really bad at doing that.
I forget who it was that said that Chelsea Manning was going to get eaten alive by the Left for being too pure and good for this world, and uh…. you called it.
I wouldn’t call this being eaten alive.
Yet.
