Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

“Well if your culture is so strong it would survive-”

Let me get a baseball bat and smash that guy’s computer.  If his computer is so strong, surely it will survive getting hit with a giant metal stick.

What’s that?  Computers are complex and expensive and only strong in a sort of economic-utility sense that has nothing to do with physical strength?

Why gee, could it be when Nationalists are talking about the importance of culture, they aren’t talking about pure replicator power, but rather something that’s ‘strong’ more in an economic-utility and social technology sense?

Who would have possibly guessed that?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[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.

[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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The existence of immune system overreactions does not mean that immune systems are a bad thing.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

The Libs have confused Nationalism for a disease because they witnessed auto-immune dysfunction, but once a nation falls below a certain level of Nationalism, it is indeed difficult to raise an army for its defense.  

Nationalism is not yet dead in the United States, but it is aspirationally among much of the Left/Libs.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

I remain confused by this idea that “we need to take away their citizenship“ as a punishment or maybe precaution for various things.

Have they committed a crime?  Is there going to be some sort of due process?  If they have and there is, why isn’t jailing them sufficient?  What problem does this solve?

[mitigatedchaos]

Depends.  Whose status is being revoked?

Foreign nationals immigrating to a nation on the pretext that they are not terrorists or criminal scum prove that they lied on their immigration forms by committing crimes, thereby removing the conditions under which citizenship was offered in the first place.

What sacrifices are you willing to make to stop Rotherham?  FGM?  Acid attacks?  Turks creating a political party denying the Armenian Genocide because Erdogan told them to?

[collapsedsquid]

If they are committing crimes, as mentioned, then as mentioned there is this thing that we’ve invented called “jail.“ Has some problems, but it seems to be the established way to handle this sort of situation. Shouldn’t matter whether they’re Pakistanis, catholic priests or BBC presenters, system should be the same for all of them.  Citizenship doesn’t seem to be the issue here.

[mitigatedchaos]

Don’t be so thickheaded. FGM is a foreign cultural practice that is normalized in certain foreign cultures. You know it. I know it. It isn’t spreading here via internet meme. It’s spreading by migration. We were promised this would not happen.

The way I see it, the rise in this and other foreign-origin crimes has one of three solutions: one, if they want it so badly, we send them back where this bullsht is normal. This the most tolerant. Two, we reestablish by force just who is in charge here. Regular jail is not enough and often in countries in Europe the sentence is far too soft. The men responsible for child rape grooming gangs in England, once convicted, should be hauled in front of the community where they lived, where this behavior was too normalized, and be publicly executed after announcing their identities and crimes in graphic detail for all to hear. Three, we cut off immigration from countries or ethnic groups where this happens for two decades to give society time to actually assimilate them after abolishing the “Cultural Mosaic” model and reestablishing Melting Pot and quit mindlessly celebrating “Diversity”. We also ban some of them from marrying inside their in-group for at least the first generation.

It’s past time to stop being a cultural antirealist.

You know male circumcision is normalized in the United States. It shouldn’t be. Why is it legal while FGM usually is not? Because it has political support. I can see paths where, if we keep going in this direction, FGM becomes normalized and progressively harder to remove from the country. Already we’re on the path it was said we wouldn’t be on.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Some people have dumb cultures and dumb ideologies that will do things like mutilate women.

But they like those cultures.

If it doesn’t come here, then I can be more “tolerant” because I don’t have to put up with the consequences of their culture/ideologies, but if it does, then I need to actively erode and erase their culture so that I don’t have to deal with the consequences, like higher crime rates.  And I can’t stop here, but have to chase their culture all the way back to its homeland since I can’t exclude it, so I effectively must practice cultural imperialism.

Additionally, the benefits of better cultures will mask the effects of bad cultures until they become sufficiently represented within the system.  This will be used to claim that bad cultures are not bad, not really, and that really the cause of all this is Western Imperialism and not having enough bad culture.  So of course, we need to import more of it.  You know, for Diversity.

We were promised by people that told us assimilation is wrong that immigrants from countries where they practice things like FGM would assimilate and not practice it here.  Now we apparently have an underground FGM group in Michigan.  How long until support for it gains political power under Democracy?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One can’t defeat ethnonationalism by supporting it for minority groups and foreigners.  That just makes one a rival ethnonationalist.

In such a case, ethnonationalism has already been accepted as valid, it’s just a matter of haggling over who is allowed to practice it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[earlgraytay]

I understand that having your field constantly mocked for being arcane and boring is unpleasant, but can you please not do the same to other people? For the love of every fucking god ever to walk this blighted earth, you’d think it’d be obvious that the weirdoes need to stick together. 

but nooooooo, clearly anyone who can Do Maths is superior and anyone who says “art is very important to most people” in slightly imprecise terms is Wrong. 

Unless you want to live in a fucking stone cube with no decoration and eat soylent for every meal, art is fucking essential. 

[nuclearspaceheater]

@ me next time.

I have no problem with people who can’t do math. But I don’t feel bad about holding people to unreasonable standards of well-roundedness when they assert that their favorite corner of human experience is equivalent to humanity itself. I suppose a true polymath may indeed call me out on this, but I strongly doubt that any true polymath would be running around asserting the superior human-ness of a single specific field in the first place.

In any case, the original article isn’t even about “art”, in the sense of what most people would consider to be missing from a stone cube, and which does include, as pointed out, such diverse works as fashion, music, movies, video games, furniture design, international technical symbols, the patterns on shampoo bottles, cooking, typography, and hentai doujins. (And not just because many of the actual stone cubes we have today are entirely the fault of artists, and the governments and large institutions that backed brutalist architecture.) It’s about “the arts” and cutting the funding they get from the United States government.

While it should be obvious that there’s a pretty hard limit on just how subversive anything that gets funding from the United States government can actually be, the author doesn’t want to admit that it’s in service of a power-that-is that they happen to side with, and so equivocates the defunding of a government arts program with the active suppression of art (by, for example, mass executions) that people would otherwise create on their own, state funding or not.

And indeed, people do create a lot of art on their own, without state funding. Every form of art you mention to emphasis the importance of art only argues against the National Endowment for the Arts, because if people can create all of that without government funding, then how important can the NEA possibly be? Not important at all, unless you want to protect art from influence of the regime, in which case, getting government money out of the arts should be something you’re entirely on board with.

[mitigatedchaos]

Much of the “subversive” art is highly overrated, buying into existing boring narratives already approved by factions that have existed for a long time, and I’m beginning to wonder about an Alt Righter’s claim that modern art is actually some kind of tax avoidance scheme.

If the government is going to fund art, it should be art that people actually LIKE and as such benefit the nation, not deliberately insulting and confusing pretentiousness. The other suitable role is to preserve elements of our cultural heritage, such as historic buildings. This isn’t like materials science where pushing the cutting edge improves our standard of living.

In other words, government-funded art should be unironically pleasant.