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One Thousand Footballmen, Standing for the Flag

mitigatedchaos

I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.

The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?”  And so on.

However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.

It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity.  For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die.  In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.

Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.

America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small.  However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.

And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.  

Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.

Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts.  It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.

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Is this an argument that one should openly advocate in favor of the performative flag-wavers and against the antiracist protesters because performative flag-waving is itself useful? Is it an argument that you should begin performative flag-waving, even if you were not doing so before? 

mitigatedchaos

It’s an argument that the performative flag-wavers are not as dumb as they seem to the outsiders.  Normie intuitions are okay about a lot of things a lot of the time.

Performative flag-waving is tier 0, unreconstructed Nationalism, with many of the problems that brings.  It’s, hm, a bit unenlightened, I would say.

One level of contrarianism up, it starts getting deconstructed, but that isn’t actually complete or good, either.  You start doing this “lol, no nations” thing, and then problems that you can’t address within your conceptual framework begins cropping up.

A more enlightened form of Nationalism is higher up the contrarianism hierarchy.  It is necessary to reconstruct Nationalism and synthesize in new information for better and more accurate performance.

To put it another way, you can use performative flag-waving Nationalism to fight Nazi Germany, but you can also use it to launch the Iraq War.  Anti-nationalism messes with your ability to do either.  Higher forms of Nationalism which enable fighting Nazi Germany but not launching the Iraq War, but which can pull from the same powerful emotions and intuitions, should be designed and deployed.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics nationalism

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quoms

it’s implicit in mainstream conceptions of nationalism/national liberation that a nation can attain the fullest expression of its freedom as a nation without ‘interference’ from anyone else, i.e. in an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous state. like that’s the ideal venue for free expression, cultural flowering, etc.

Keep reading

mitigatedchaos

Not everyone has the same experience as you, and not every Nationalist is a cultural-isolation-maximizer.

The Japanese have managed to remain Japanese while changing, flowing, adapting concepts from around the world, and they have an entire subset of their syllabulary used to represent foreign loanwords.

And yet… the lack of crime, the lack of Islamic terrorist attacks, being able to trust children to ride the train to school, carefully queuing up to receive supplies in the wake of a massive natural disaster… in other, more multicultural places this either isn’t the case, is only the case for the wealthy, or is enforced by the iron hand of a soft authoritarian state.

Culture is a wave, not a water, but that doesn’t mean we have to blur all of them together.  Diversity isn’t a terminal value.

Source: quoms the iron hand fish breathe water nationalism

But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.

It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.

And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.

politics the iron hand my tags

If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.

Sovereignty is won by force.  Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the government.  Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?

The mighty iron hand of the Singaporean state would not let such a thing go so easily.  It would seek to crush such opposition.

These behaviors can be stopped at the margins, if they are stopped now.  Otherwise, this is the future you choose.

politics a previous era the iron hand
argumate
ozymandias271 ozymandias271

I’m going to start a new political party. It’s the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party, and our platform is that we don’t like human rights abuses. I understand from this election cycle that this is a controversial opinion but I think it has a lot of merit

argumate

if you vote for the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party then people will die

mitigatedchaos

Actually, politics pretty much always involves deciding who is going to die.

That might be violent criminals, that might be cops, that might be dudes who are not violent criminals that get killed by cops anyway.  That might be cancer patients who die because you didn’t immediately seize all wealth to use for treating cancer.  That might be future patients that die because you seized all wealth, undermining new treatment development.

Even if you get rid of the state, that, too, is a decision about who will die.

Source: cptsdcarlosdevil politics the iron hand

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.

politics grumpy identity politics nationalism

You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”: 

“Nanny State”

Me, completely unapologetic about the existence of a progressive income tax, flirting with the reintroduction of corporal punishment as an alternative to lengthy prison sentences, plotting the introduction of mixed martial arts to high school curricula as part of national civil defense infrastructure, and planning the partial legalization of some soft drugs in order to disrupt the cartels:

image
politics the mitigated exhibition the mighty iron hand of the state the iron hand shtpost visual shtpost what even is this blog the meme game

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
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…

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.  
  4. 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.

politics nationalism
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