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A while ago, @anagast replied to one of my comments with:
There was something in that image that made me feel confused. Later, I realized what it was: to me, liberalism and turning everything into samey globalist soup are a non sequitur.
Consider what is probably the epitome of liberal globalization: New York City. Out of the roughly 8.5 million people who live there, 37% are foreign-born. With over 800 languages spoken there, it's also the most linguistically diverse place in the world. And while the city is easy to characterize, and often is, as politically and bureaucratically a American-Democrat stronghold, it's not really how it looks like on the street.
There's a ton of conservatism here. Walk around long enough and you'll bump into a wedding or funeral or some other celebration that's done in a beautiful traditional style. Or, talk with enough people, and you'll learn that while they put on the right face for the DEI training at white collar job, they're against abortion and other markers of leaning right.
It's hard to describe all of it unless you've had a few week to live here. The city is a patchwork quilt of hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups, some taking up a single block while others, like the Chinese or Hasidic Jews, basically run whole neighborhoods. Walking in a straight line for maybe an hour feels like traveling through half a dozen countries.
Now, all these people, at least most of them, enjoy the fruits of globalization. They drink coke. Eat pizza and sushi. Browse reddit. But overall, their primary cultural identity is unaffected. I suspect it's because liberalism creates a free market for ideas, allowing people to pick and choose, which strengthens good ideas and causes weak ones to fade away.
Put another way: if you try to enforce culture in a top-down way, you'll get a lot of "coverage", but most adherents will be on board just because everyone else is. Their identity is weak, ripe for the taking by the next guy who takes over. But if you allow people to sort themselves out on their own, the feeling of ownership creates a much deeper, stronger sense of belonging that's not going to be changed by a coca cola advertisement.
That's how I explain to myself why so many cultures in NYC have integrated but not assimilated. Integrated, because they follow the common, basic set of rules: mind your own business, treat others with respect, do your job. Not assimilated because despite living here for >1 generations, they've not become part of some bland, uniform uberculture. If anything, the need to exist alongside so many other tribes has made them work on distilling the best parts of their culture to make it appealing and strong to outsiders and a source of pride for the insiders.
Also, what I think all these rather conservative immigrants bring to the table in the city is that they keep the politicians and bureaucrats honest. No ooey-gooey feel-good diversity--no, they're gonna get the real thing, they're gonna get respect for the culture and community. In a way, I suspect they're the ones responsible for the success of liberal ideals in the city.
(There's some parallel here between how marrying the state and the Church led to calcification of religion in Europe, whereas the freedom of religion in the USA led to an explosion of it, but I'm not familiar with history enough to use that as an argument).
That's why I think that liberalism and globalization don't lead to creating a samey globalist liberal soup, but just the opposite--they lead to differentiation, fragmentation, and and constant evolution and improvement of culture.
And the reason why both sides of the political spectrum are afraid of this (lefties crying about dying languages and indigenous customs; righting crying about the death of tradition) is because they are afraid of the creative destruction that liberalism brings to bear against their ideas. But in doing so, they are actually restricting the growth and refinement of their cultures.
(cough All hail Tzeentch cough)
I will defend the opposite view.
Yeah, you have the language, the foods, the music, but those will eventually melt together. Even you provide a constant stream of new immigrants, and they willingly self-segregate, the million small markers of culture will eventually disappear. Only a few larger ones will remain, as a symbol of identity, like some Americans celebrate St. Patrick's day.
Which brings me to my second point. The larger empire will tolerate the harmless and meaningless traits of the constituent cultures, but not anything meaningful. You can keep the foods. You can keep the songs (most of them). You cannot enforce a community with your norms.
While the EU is nominally in favor of cultural diversity, it means they will subsidize folk dresses and bland exhibits with 27 flags. It does not mean they will allow an Eastern European country to be against gay
marriagerights. It does not mean they will allow a country to practice eugenics, or protect key industries. You might agree with these decisions, but my point is that the EU and ANZAC allow only surface level diversity.Because culture is downstream from economics and politics. Japan's building codes make it very easy to make tiny restaurants on the first floor, so their streets are alive with such restaurants. In the Middle East, the climate is dry and the laws forbid alcohol, so they have cuisine with figs and shisha bars everywhere.
Yes, you have a constant stream of immigrants that self-segregate in neighbourhoods, and that slows down the integration. It might take generations to melt them, but it is happening nonetheless, because the laws are the same, the economics are the same for everyone. The first generation will do everything the same as back home, the second will adjust, but their children will eventually meld.
A bizarre assertion, given that, according to my count, 13 of the EU's 27 members don't allow gay marriage.
Eugenics is not part of the traditional culture of any country. The reason it's not implemented anywhere is a lack of popular support; it has nothing to do with the EU.
This has moved well beyond preserving culture and into plain economics. The EU does in fact protect traditional products. What the EU doesn't allow is protectionist restrictions that are meant to benefit one country's companies over those of another.
In Denmark, the Danish Cytogenetic Central Register, shows an average of 98% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth are aborted each year.
Denmark is also famous for exporting tall blue-eyed babies via sperm donation catalogues
So, examples of currently active positive and negative eugenics going on there.
And has the EU interfered in any of this?
Presumably not, but that's because both of these examples are poor ones, in each case coupling a small dose of what globohomo hates with a large dose of what globohomo likes, making it an aggregate win for the globalist homogenisers.
Abort disabled people? This is not globohomo. But look at it from the other side: abort disabled people, and we see that it is in fact smack in line with the no-questions-asked abortifactants on demand that the cosmopolitan class loves.
Encourage single mothers to have blonde blue eyed babies? Bad. Encourage single mothers to have blonde blue eyed babies? Good, smash the patriarchy, children don't need fathers anyway.
You're assuming certain modes of thinking from your outgroup to the point where you have to massage the assumed framing of those situations into quite tortured angles.
Compare: "Genocide white people? Bad. Genocide white people? Good, everyone knows white right-wingers love genocide. Now you see how anti-white tendencies in the West are an aggregate win for the white supremacists".
I don't think it's tortured at all. Furthermore, my proposal actually serves to resolve the contradictions of a brown-scare hegemony thumbs-up-ing eugenic abortions/inseminations. Where's your explanation?
Characterising my argument as
has to be some sort of strawmanning record. To speak plainly: I am suggesting that, in the cases I proposed, the noncentral effects (preservation of pro-choice norms, increasing the proportion of (biological) fatherless households) really do serve the homogenisers' purpose more than the central effects (anti-dysgenic abortions, pro-eugenic inseminations) harm it. You're going to have a difficult time arguing that a normalisation of genocide improves right-winger's chances more than literally committing white genocide harms it.
Admitting one doesn't have a good answer to a contradiction is strictly better for light-making purposes than throwing out a bad answer. And when one's best solution is "group X likes measure xY despite Y because x", I must assume they haven't looked very hard. For the record, my first assumption would be "the group is less X and more Y than Butlerian thinks if they like xY".
The so-called "globohomo" ideology has shown itself to be extremely intolerant of eugenics for the purposes of producing white blond blue-eyed children, so I hope you can see why I highly doubt tacking on "single mothers" suddenly makes it worth it.
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Didn't say it did, I was just pointing out that it was implemented somewhere, and is popular
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