MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
22hr ago
The difference between those things you’ve described as historically common, which I agree is accurate, and a more generic “deliberate cruelty as deterrent for mass illegal migration” is that the latter has not been supplanted by anything clearly superior.
The Industrial Revolution killed chattel slavery & most extreme institutional types of patriarchy. It substituted a physical technology in place of a social one; it was made possible to permanently discard old ways through sheer power of technology.
The same cannot be said about of the problem of mass migration and the erosion of the hosts’ social environment that it causes.
As I’ve stated before, the only possible way this can be completely ignored is if the framing simply doesn’t acknowledge or value the social solidarity provided by the nation at all; it requires a wholesale denial or blindness to the glue that binds various societies together since time immemorial.
As a former libertarian, I’m frankly embarrassed by how blind I was to these basic social truths. On X, a pithy little tweet described libertarianism as “truly the only equivalent of feminism for men.” Which made me chuckle; the theory only works if you’re willingly or unknowingly blind to social forces which make the political possible in the first place.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1d ago
I suspect his list of “countries worth defending” is paper thin in both time and space, as if political morality only started 70 years ago.
Liberal internationalists are almost all like this. It’s terminal recency bias.
It’s like that meme about liberals lecturing Christians about Jesus; “No, I don’t believe in your backwards ideas, but if I say the right things you might do what I want.”
Substitute The Nation for Jesus and you’ve got it pegged; in reality they don’t think any nation is really worth defending on its own terms, they never have, and they never will. It’s total anathema to them. When pressed, they don’t even think The Nation exists or should exist, or they believe in it in only the vaguest, wishy washy terms.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1d ago
That’s not true, if you’ve lived in or near a beach town or ski town there’s plenty of serving staff who only work in a restaurant a portion of the year, every year.
They just work like crazy to make enough money to support themselves on a part time job or unemployed for the remainder for the year.
It’s like a tour of duty. There’s lots of industries that are hyper seasonal and / or are intensive for short amounts of time.
Oil workers are like that, for example. Fisherman, cowboys, that’s just off the top of my head.
Some people really love the freedom of working extremely hard for part of the year and consequently fucking off for the rest of the year.
So, most of the countries that have existed in the entirety of human history are not worth defending?
Inter-ethnic conflict that expresses itself in “cruelty as deterrent” is as historically common as the summer rain. It’s currently happening in multiple places, and depending on where you live, it’s happened in the recent past. In your backyard.
I find it rather hubristic to tell someone from the baltics, the balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia that their country isn’t worth defending.
This is very “rootless cosmopolitan” coded.
I disagree. Institutions and memeplexes exist in a positive or negative feedback loop in relation to its constituents, it’s not unidirectional like an impossibly neat organizational chart; not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of the parts are a function of the sum of the whole.
Individuals and institutions push and mold each other and they have values independent of each other but separately the whole equation shifts.
When I was younger I saw as criticism of globalism & neoliberal economics a term; “Autistic economics”. I laughed when I saw it at first but I think there was a there there in the criticism.
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