Clearly he isn’t powerful enough to turn Trump into the Fuhrer, so technically this will count as your good deed for the next 100 years or so for lowering the probability of WW3.
I was talking about my republican father about immigration. He flat out said he cares more about Americans than non Americans and that horrified me. Like… I’m not extrapolating this from some other position he holds, he literally said those words.
I asked him what made Americans so morally relevant. Perhaps he thinks Americans have a greater capacity for feeling pain and should be protected more because of that? Perhaps non Americans are automatically evil?? He said no, it’s because he is an American. He said also that it sucks when a player from another baseball team gets hit in the head with a baseball but when somebody from his favorite team gets hit in the head it’s a tragedy.
This is so hard for me to understand, like… they’re both people!
Also, it can’t just be that he thinks people with more in common with him are more worth preserving. Like, he would definitely have more in common with a truck driving poker fan in Belgium than a black punk rocker communist in America. I should point this out to him next time.
Arrrrrgh whyyyyyyyy
tribalism is a thing, group membership is still important
anyway we know the drill: arrange a Martian invasion, unite humanity against it!
Ok but how is a country a group even it’s just a bunch of people who happen to be born in the same spot
Why doesn’t he feel more tribalism with poker players worldwide the way I do with rationalists worldwide (and even then I don’t think we matter more than other people when it comes to quality of life!)
DiscoursedRome had a lot of good stuff to add in response to this, but also:
If a nation fails to maintain a sufficiently large core of people who are willing to kill and die for it, it will cease to be a nation. These people must be willing to kill those who, outside of a war, would not deserve it.
For instance, do you think most of the men fighting in the Iraqi Army during the invasion of Kuwait deserved to die? Most of them were there through fear, probably coerced. The same would be true of a Communist invasion. For North Korea, one can argue that even if they’re brainwashed into it, no one deserves to be brainwashed. And sometimes, people that would otherwise be normal will fight to the death during a war out of loyalty or ideology.
That isn’t to say that you can’t do anything about this. The US Army deliberately targeted armored vehicles rather than light infantry and took many prisoners during the first war with Iraq, in part because they knew the men would surrender.
But if some dictator took over Mexico and formed an army of conscripts moving north, bent on human wave attacks, then you have to be willing to kill at least some of them who didn’t deserve to be in a conscript army, or you will lose territory.
Of course, having this capability means having the ability to misuse it, which is why I will never forgive the NeoCons.
There are other things like this as well. There are criminals, terrorists, ideologies with higher numbers of terrorists, foreign agents, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, elements that would politically undermine democracy, and so on. Then there are incentive problems with open borders, in that if people aren’t at least somewhat glued to a location, they have less incentive to take care of it. There are issues with the fragility of cultures, institutions, and moral norms.
If the entirety of Earth were made up of the LW diaspora this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but it isn’t.
Anarcho-Capitalism and hardcore Libertarianism both assume the political and cultural conditions under which they can be created and maintained. If some other group comes along that can undermine the cultural support for their ideals over the long term, or better unite to use force, they will inevitably be dethroned and replaced with something else.
White Americans aged 80+ vs. White Americans aged 0-4 by county.
I think this means the country is growing to be less white and that makes me happy
The actual non-racist response is to be indifferent. If all races are equal, and equally valuable, then a reduction in the percentage of whites is something to be neither celebrated nor pitied.
And indeed, we have many loyal, hard-working citizens of many races in this country.
But I’m coming around to the idea of contradictions in ideology.
The language required for the diversity arguments implicitly accepts some of the frame premises of the White Nationalists, but refuses to engage with them.
I literally don’t care what this post makes White Nationalists think, since they should all be 6 feet in the fucking ground
This was literally just a casual comment on how I enjoy diversity, why are people still reblogging it with 9 page arguments 3 or 4 months later
You should care because even though their ideology will be technologically obsolete within about 30 years thanks to advancements in genetic engineering, they are capable of doing damage in the meantime, and reckless behavior by their opponents is increasing their numbers. If WNs enact violence I will be obligated to fight them to ensure the civil order of the United States, but if others fight the WNs I will have to fight them instead for the same reason. Since violence is out as an option, that leaves deconversion or at the very least not making more of them. Right now the Left is making more of them.
As for your post, it’s getting reblogged because, while casual, it’s a good simple example of the contradictions within pro-diversity Neoliberalism.
“Nationalism? How can you take pride in something you didn’t produce?” They asked.
You didn’t produce your nation when you came to it, but your nation produced you. And then, once you become a part of your nation, you do.
Nations are continually produced by their citizens, great projects of many hands, like civilizations.
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.
What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?
I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.
Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.
However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.
Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.
Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).
But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?
Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.
Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?
All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.
But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.
And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.
Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.
Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment: “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their government even when it is wrong.”
The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time. On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to 2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved significantly over the survey period.
The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism; they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after 1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the proportion of youth who felt that way.
While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking. Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?
As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it. But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either. Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.
For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian. In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.
