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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   29574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I was watching some random youtube recommendation, and they were talking about Britain not meeting recruiting targets either. And one of them quipped "Nobody wants to fight and die for an economic zone."

I may not have gotten the words precisely the way they said them.

All the same, it hit the mark for me. You fight and die for a nation. A nation that performs some combination of representing and defending your values, family, and prosperity. These days the governments of our open borders economic zones actively undermine our values, attack our families, and pillage our future.

That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.

Why should I not simply open the gates of the city if I feel that the rule of my external enemy would be less repressive than the enemy that already rules over me?

(Alternately: if the women aren't putting out for me, what would the enemy fucking them change? If I don't fight, I'll probably survive; if the enemy is more enlightened than my culture so much the better for me. The women can defend themselves- they keep asserting they can anyway.)

This is the defining question of what a nation is. The fact that Western societies aren't currently at war with each other (mostly because they're American protectorates, but also because nobody's managed to onshore the resources and manufacturing know-how to be able to credibly threaten their neighbors) is ultimately what has allowed the vast majority of those nations to be consumed by what is, at a population level, husband vs. wife power struggles.

An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.

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