burkeboi
1d ago
The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.
I agree that putting the Volk as the only thing worthy of moral consideration, with all other rights subordinate to it, is a core ideological feature that made Nazism, and fascism in general, so harmful.
At the same time, I think the issue is when you decide a group, or concept, is the only thing that matters morally and no other rights are important rather than whatever group or concept in particular you elevate. The communists killed millions for the revolution and utopia. In pre-modern eras, millions were butchered for king and/or faith. The crime is in discarding individual rights, not in the object you decide is the only important thing in the world.
The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)
Is there a limit to this principle? Can families morally have ingroup preference? What about a community the size of dunbar’s number? Is the limit more about how much preference you can give someone vs the reason for the preference?
While equality of people is a good, it is a good that has to be balanced against the fact that any individual human has people they care about and people they don’t and our social lives, and really civilization as a whole, are built on this distinction.
The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.
I think this is more the crime of the Confederates and isn’t really the core objection to Nazi Germany. I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights. All societies have had both positive and negative rights, and you can’t clearly separate the two in practice. Which rights different people have is a constant negotiation. While I think slavery is a clear violation of equality under the law, and the civil war is an example of the problems it caused, I don’t think you can just from the specific case of slavery to a modern rich vs poor issue.
burkeboi
1d ago
I think it’s really necessary to look at the MoS when evaluating soldiers. I personally know guys in the military who would only face physical danger in a black swan scenario. I also know special forces soldiers who face double digit percent risks of death and/or disfigurement. I think we need to look more at MoS than just “is he a veteran” to determine both the danger the soldier was in and the esteem we should give his service.
burkeboi
1d ago
The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.
What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors? Do you believe how we currently teach these events inoculates students against these attitudes?
I think those two questions are what make the historiography of human cruelty controversial. Different people can look at the same event, and have completely different opinions on it.
An example of this would be the Holocaust. Just looking at Jews in particular, here were/are four responses/interpretations to it:
- This was a failure of insufficient small L liberalism. We must promote liberalism globally to avoid tragedies like this in the future.
- Capitalism and imperialism naturally leads to war and genocide. We need global Marxist revolution to prevent this.
- Jews need to be armed and have a state of their own, so they are too tough to victimize ever again.
- Hitler is a new Nebuchadnezzar, sent by God to punish us for our apostasy.
There are more interpretations, especially once you get interpretations beyond just Jews. If you teach a particular interpretation, it’s quite possible that instead of reducing the chance of a new atrocity, you either do nothing or maybe even increase the chance.
burkeboi
1d ago
What is the solution? No more peacekeeping missions, anti terrorist actions and special military operations, but retvrn to great wars ending in glorious victories, accomplishments so shining that every young man with motivation and drive would want to wear uniform and be part of winning team.
If you increase the danger, wouldn’t that just make the private sector more attractive for potential recruits? If you want better recruits, it seems you either have to make the private sector worse, increase actual/social compensation for the military, or use coercion/the draft.
There is also the issue that “better” is different for different jobs. Most PMC would make terrible door kickers.
burkeboi
1d ago
For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.
I don’t really recall that being the dominant conservative viewpoint, at least where I grew up. Explaining Nazism isn’t really that big an issue for classical conservatism: humans are prone to cruelty, and civilization barely holds those impulses in check until it doesn’t. While the specifics differ, Germans went Nazi for the same reasons Russians went Stalinist for the same reason Comanches smashed babies against rocks: humans are inclined to cruelty, and organize in ways to facilitate organized cruelty.
The bigger argument is if conservatism, or any particular ideology, has a good track record of restraining those impulses. That’s a far bigger and honestly unresolved argument.
burkeboi
8d ago
When people argue for immigration restrictionism to Israel, they often specifically speak of Palestinians and/or hypothetical Muslim immigrants who are directly hostile to Israel. Why not third parties? Indians would love higher wages. The worst parts of Latin America have tons of people who want that too. Christian parts of Africa as well. If we do believe that good systems can produce productive people, which to a greater or lesser extent is a/the core belief of most moderate immigration supporters, than all of those people coming into Israel will quickly be value adds. If you have 30 million Israelis, the Palestinians just aren't a problem. At that point, you can likely start including them in the fold as well. Unless you think people named Juan, Mobutu, or Ramesh are inherently alien to your polity, this honestly could be a long term plan.
To speak plainly: I can see how even under standard liberalism, you can justify keeping Palestinians and certain openly hostile citizens of certain Middle Eastern states out of Israel. To have a conception of Israel that excludes the possibility of third parties like Latinos and Christian Africans coming and assimilating, at a greater or lesser rate, is exclusionary to the point that is outside the Overton Window of the left hand side of any western polity. Israel is considered a western polity, and liberal zionists certainly argue that it is, and them not being held to the standards of other western polities is what is causing the left to rapidly sour on them. Most modern leftists don't think that modern Jews get to claim an exception to the 'no ethnostates' rule.
burkeboi
8d ago
Bespoke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel so Indians and Filipinos can settle in Israel and marginally increase global GDP.
burkeboi
8d ago
There does seem to be a general trend that whenever you elevate a single aspect of a culture or a single ideology to define an entire society, that society breaks down. To give an example, if you look at most historic western countries post 1776/1789, they tended to function on a mix of liberalism, local denominations of christianity, nationalism (which was historically tied to liberalism), regionalism, and tons of other local values and traditions. It's the same everywhere; all societies inherit tons of different values that are in negotiation with each other. When you try and elevate a singular value system to dominate all the others or erase all the others, that's when you have problems.
Sometimes it can be clearly disastrous, like in the case of Communism or Nazism, but other times the damage is more insidious. "Hypocrisy" often is not just someone lying for self interest; it's often a thoughtful and useful compromise between two or more values both of which are important.
burkeboi
1mo ago
If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.
That seems contradicted by the behavior and beliefs of roughly 100% of Catholics historically, though. While one can argue for more or less immigration on prudential grounds, all non-church institutions and culture not being worth preserving doesn't seem to be a common viewpoint. What do you base it on? I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but that posture seems more akin to radical protestantism than Catholicism or Orthodoxy I'm familiar with.
burkeboi
1mo ago
"40 years ago, our great state recognized the intrinsic liberty of at-will employment, and the need to free workers of mandatory union dues. We became a right to work state. Today, I propose we take the next step in the advancement of human liberty; I propose we become a right to fuck state."
burkeboi
1mo ago
The people who wrote the Constitution had crushed Shay's Rebellion already
Not only that, but Shay's Rebellion was an immediate proximate cause of the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War.
Jews are also one of the oldest ethnoreligious groups in the world, and I'm pretty sure by far the oldest that has spent most of it's time as a merchant minority. Once you take those factors into account, I don't think their history indicates that they are currently or in the near future will be predictably in more danger as Jews than other merchant minorities. Armenians are in the same boat, if you look at the past 100 years.
I specifically mentioned a lot of the above groups since many of them faced persecution in the very recent past. The Hutu and Tutsi were butchering each other as late as the 2000s in the Congo. Rather than try and force a Hutu or Tutsi ethnostate, you have largely had a stop to the massacres by changes in government policy and culture instead.
Asking for an ethnostate is a pretty big ask; it's asking for all people in a given territory to either leave or be ok with the state and culture being made to service the needs of a particular group of inhabitants of an area often at the expense of other inhabitants. While sometimes it is the lesser of two evils, such as some post WW1 and WW2 settlements, it's always at best the lesser of two evils. Typically the other evil has to be brutal international war and/or crimes against humanity.
Asking for the establishment of an ethnostate, rather than just the maintenance of once which is a far more moderate and reasonable ask, is so extreme that if Israel didn't exist today I would object to it. Given Israel already exists, it should not be destroyed since that would require great tragedy, but it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Should the Hutu and Tutsi have ethno-states? What about the Yazidi, or the Kurds? The Rohingya? The Germans? Different Amerindian groups across the Americas? Given that Israel exists now, and destroying it would be a humanitarian catastrophe, I think it aught to continue. At the same time, I don't think being subject of a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing entitles a group to an ethno-state in perpetuity. That interest has to be balanced against other interests.
burkeboi
1mo ago
But with a profoundly disabled child the indenture is for life.
Sounds like slavery to me.
burkeboi
1mo ago
I was reading the book Expecting Better from Oster since I'm having a kid soon, and she gave a stat where something like 80% or so of SIDS deaths come from smoking households in the UK. Those households are like 10-15% of the total households. That's not to say smoking is the big killer, although it is pretty bad for fetuses and new babies, but a family that is likely to smoke around their kid is likely to ignore other best practices as well.
From that, and other things I've read, it seems that SIDS is highly correlated with parents who do tons of things wrong, rather than just one thing or another. The "conspiracy" take is that a lot of public health messaging, to make the underclass and/or specific minorities look less bad, overemphasizes that 'this could happen to anyone' rather than pointing to most SIDS happening from parents being really negligent on many axes rather than Sally the Secretary having a drink every now and then.
burkeboi
2mo ago
Historically in many societies, landlords had the right to use corporal punishment on their tenants. I wonder how a grand bargain of combining rent control with corporal punishment would affect the market. This is real radical centrism.
burkeboi
2mo ago
If you define 'working' as reducing crime/violence, I agree it won't work. If you define 'working' as harming the outgroup/red tribe, I think this will work to a greater or lesser extent.
burkeboi
2mo ago
I'm not sure it really makes sense to talk of policing nationally in the US. While there are some areas that embrace woke policing more or less, I used to live in one, other ones have policing tactics that haven't been affected by it. I think the dominance of 'racial considerations' when policing very much is a place-by-place thing. While it may be the case in, say, San Francisco that the overton window is limited to undesirable options that's not necessarily the case in other parts of the country.
burkeboi
2mo ago
The actions are not politically acceptable, and that is why we cannot implement them. It does not matter if there are ways of stopping black criminals if we cannot implement them. We've seen what happens if we try -- the pushback gets stronger until we stop doing it, people who notice the issue are ostracized, it becomes illegal to use data to demonstrate things, and if the data stubbornly keep showing the wrong things, they just stop publishing or collecting it.
Doesn't this largely depend on where you are, though? The initial 60s liberalization/crime wave ended in Giuliani time. Even beyond that, the 60s-90s crime wave affected parts of the US very unevenly; parts of the US like NYC had pretty omnipresent crime, while others like suburban Texas really did not. I've lived in both big blue cities, purple suburbs, and red exurbs and the treatment of crime, as well as experience of crime, really is local.
burkeboi
2mo ago
By the time I went in 2016-2020, it's culture had already largely converged with other 'Ivy' related universities. Individual departments and individual coursework could be hard, but they can be hard at any university if the student elects to go that route. I haven't been there since, but I don't really think they have a meaningfully different culture like they may have had in the '80s.
burkeboi
2mo ago
Except none of that is happening. Taxes are paid by the "old" -- well, really, the middle aged, but our angry Zoomer doesn't make a distinction
In Zoomer parlance, the Tax system is Boomer-on-Boomer crime.
burkeboi
2mo ago
I believe that X people are a burden and Y people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the Y
Endless human conflict is based on this principle. It really never works out as intended.
burkeboi
2mo ago
I really didn't care for any third spaces, I would consume things like BJJ but not really put in effort to maintain them, for a long time. Then in my late twenties my wife and I were about to have a kid in a new city and we didn't know anyone. Joining a church kind of fixed everything socially.
The last Spanish election was a nail biter. This seems to be a pretty bold move by a government that is not that secure necessarily.
Another thing to point out is that Spain has an East Asian TFR now. On the flip side, they can get practically infinity immigrants from Latin America dependent solely on how many they want to let in. Letting in MENA immigrants just seems like a terrible idea given they haven’t gone through their source of more culturally compatible immigrants yet.
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