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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

n.n.: For practical purposes I agree, except ~institutions~

In my opinion, nations are something like waves - an emergent phenomenon that exists on a substrate of people, institutions, culture, land, physical infrastructure, and so on.

And as such, while it’s difficult to determine what, exactly, the moral liability or capability of “the United States of America” is, or that of any particular American within the system or as a share of the USA’s burdens, it’s a real entity or thing that exists and has causal power.

If we define nations out of existence, to some degree, I think we also risk defining people out of existence.

nationalism

Cultural Transmission

Screw it.  I was going to make a more detailed piece, but this will have to do for now.

Cultural transmission is more similar to a weighted, directed graph than to some other models.

We can think of agents as the nodes, and their modes of interaction and communication as the edges.

Cultural norms reinforce themselves through interactions and use, creating an environment where they are dominant.

Key for assimilation is cultural pressure to conform.  If all interactions are with the host culture, the pressure to conform is enormous and there is no reinforcement to support resisting it.

This is partially based on the dispersal of agents and their interactions within the environment, but it is also based on relative size.

Any given nation therefore has both a maximum theoretical and a practical assimilatory capacity.  This can be altered by a number of factors, including policy, dominant ideology, and geographical and cultural distribution.

Of course, in the modern world, the number of potential cultural transmission vectors is much larger (particularly including the Internet).

flagpost the culture war nationalism
rendakuenthusiast

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.

rendakuenthusiast

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
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

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.

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 (Wikipedia, wrt ethnic rates of cousin marriage and assoc. issues in UK, etc), 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.

nationalism politics anons asks

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

@wirehead-wannabe

There this rightist thing that keeps fucking infuriating me more and more, where they won’t state outright whether their bundle of policy and norm and social technology proposals is supposed to help everyone or whether it’s supposed to help the ingroup. Like, is this whole localism-ingroupism thing supposed to be pursuing the utilitarian optimum, or is it supposed to be pursuing ingroup benefit at the expense of everyone else, or is it supposed to be giving up on the rest of the world and saving yourselves or or or or or or I’ve never found any socially conservative rhetoric that didn’t leave me ruminating for hours on end trying to extract something coherent and driving myself insane trying to articulate what specifically it even is that’s nothing me.

How much freedom should others have?

It isn’t a trick question.

The reason it doesn’t seem like localism-ingroupism is either trying to completely solve for global utility optimum or global freedom or fuck-everyone-else-ism is because it’s trying to find a balance between competing concerns.

If I am responsible for the well-being of everyone, then I become obligated to destroy their cultures and replace them with something more effective/efficient, because I am not interested in paying for the side effects of their dumb cultural policies.  

If there is total freedom, then like Hell am I paying for everyone else’s dumb decisions, because there will be no end, ever, to the subsidy.  And if it ever seems like my shining army of economic robots has finally defeated the scarcity and delivered the desired level of wealth at the same time as full freedom?  They’ll just have more kids and push the per-capita wealth right back down again.

This localism-ingroupism places non-absolute limits on freedom and non-absolute limits on obligation, making it feasible to transfer wealth to the worse off by limiting the effects of cultural policies that would destroy or overwhelm the ability to create that wealth in the first place.

And, it says “well if you want to do something that stupid, then go do it over there and don’t make me pay for it”, so there is still even more freedom, but it’s decoupled from obligation.

And, if every country works for its own benefit but without randomly trainwrecking other countries in the manner of the Bush Administration, then the effect is somewhat akin to the invisible hand - different climates, economies, and populations have different needs, so it makes sense for those close to these needs who are acquainted with them to make the law.

(Thus I oppose a number of measures which various right-wing or more dominance-focused nationalists would support.  Seeing as I’m trying to summon a new ideology from beyond the veil, I’m not necessarily a representative sample.)

politics alison dont read nationalism

Anonymous asked:

Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.

I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.

Meandering rant/textwall incoming.  TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.

1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost.  It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”

- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them.  Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it.  Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else.  As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.

- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way.  (And sometimes, we are the bad people.)  The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme.  It could be discord which breaks the community apart.  It could be theft.  It could be murder.  Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.

Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end. 

(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)

- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction.  This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered.  So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.

- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion.  We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community.  If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.

2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.

Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).

(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)

Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills.  Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.

At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show.  It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah.  A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with.  That’s actually a really big benefit!  It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!

One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.

The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.

Soon they outnumber the “natives.”  The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations.  The level of irony goes up as well.

The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.

The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se.  They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony.  They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.

The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliterated without anyone even trying to obliterate it.

And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.

Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.

3. People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically.  Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.

And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.

4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.

Take polygamy.

Polygamy, as practiced, has lots of bad correlations.

Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?

No.

But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy.  This includes things like child marriages.

Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.

Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem?  Very much yes.

And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.

5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.

The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.

(The above isn’t secretly about race.  I literally mean architecture.)

This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.

6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.

They may not even do this legally.

7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”

Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious.  Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.

Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.

Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.

Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.

All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.

Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict.  It merely moves it inwards one step.

Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.

8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.

This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.

Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.

It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory.  (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.)  People feel like they own the nation.  That matters.  A lot.

Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.

9. Open Borders has bad incentives.

- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.

- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.

- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor.  (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)

- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE.  You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed.  Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.

And so on.

But it gets a lot worse.

10. Open Borders means World Government.

Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.

And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.

This means the creation of a world police.

The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.

Power flows upwards and centralizes.  As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.

US Federal power expanded.  EU power expanded.  This is the natural course of things.

11. World Government is very, very bad.

11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.

This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.

Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.  

Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it.  This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.

So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit.  Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.

11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.

Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.

This means the quality of the world government will be terrible.  In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.

And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.

11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.

Seriously.

Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.

But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.

politics nationalism longpost

“My nation, why would I care for that?  I was only born there!”

And raised there.  And educated there.  And cultured there.  

You’ll defend yourself?  You and what army?

Oh, you don’t have an army.  The country does.  Fancy that.

“How ignorant,” you say, to want to defend or identify with the place with people like you, who speak your language, practice your culture, are bound together for the common welfare and common defense.  You know, your home.

Not all homes are good homes, but that doesn’t make homes in general bad.

That doesn’t mean it’s necessary to go to certain extremes, but if you don’t see the appeal of nations, if it looks like only flag-waving to you, you might be a fish breathing water and wondering about the validity of ponds.

nationalism
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