|
Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On January 31 2018 07:18 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2018 06:23 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:59 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. It's not just fascism, it's the whole spectrum of authoritarian ideas that are pervasive and on the rise. Fascism is just one of the trickiest of those, because it combines a lot of populist arguments: prejudices, traditionalism/conservativism, nationalism, being against the rich etc. Since all politicians, including the self-proclaimed liberals and socialists, keep on regurgitating the ideas that good politics can make real life conditions better for the people, a lot of people start to seek fo for those parties that speak of the most problems at once and are the most forceful/authoritarian in trying to achieve those goals. Populism will always be the greatest threat to democracy. Some forms of populism end in economic crisis. Others end with camps and national sham. Fear people who say they want to kill the rich right along side those who demonize immigrants. Of course. But that doesn't mean it won't happen if you don't change the eco-social conditions that make people demand these desperate solutions. One thing that I believe most "educated people" don't understand is that there aren't half as many dumb people as they believe there are. People understand very well what they want and are quite capable of drawing conclusions on the basis of what they have been told and what they have experienced. If you tell people for decades that "this is their country" and "they can demand whatever they want from politics because of democracy", you will end up with people that vote against "sharing" their country. And if they can't vote against, they will believe they have the moral high ground, even if it takes doing the most cruel things to those that they believe are intruders. If you tell people year after year after year "how great we are all doing economically", then they will ask you for "their share" and if not they will seek for their share where they believe they can find it, which is they will demand it from "the rich". Such things aren't stupid conclusions, they are highly logical by what the people are being told. The only solution I see to this is to empower everyone individually. You can't replace individual responsibility and consent to laws, trades and state decisions with the power of "liberal" or "social" governments, "free" press and whatnot. These are illusions. They are important ingredients for a free society, but they cannot work if more and more people believe with good reason they don't have control over their lives, their lands and their politics anymore.
You state this as fact, but provide nothing to back up that claim. All the ideas you references, including individualism are constructs. They are no more real than the concept of freedom. And coming from the land where we god damn worship the idea of personal freedom, there is no salvation there. Only the prosperity gospel and a worship of an ethereal meritocracy that reward the worthy.
What you are hinting at is faith in democratic systems and governance, which no amount of individual liberty will provide. Especially in the information age where state actors from other nations undermine that faith. Or people within your country that point to the immigrant and claim they are harbingers of your disenfranchisement within our own nation. Because where I am from, the people yelling about immigrants coming to take away jobs and change our culture are funded by the staggeringly wealthy that just hoping they can fly under the radar for one more election.
|
On January 31 2018 07:32 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2018 07:18 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 06:23 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:59 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. It's not just fascism, it's the whole spectrum of authoritarian ideas that are pervasive and on the rise. Fascism is just one of the trickiest of those, because it combines a lot of populist arguments: prejudices, traditionalism/conservativism, nationalism, being against the rich etc. Since all politicians, including the self-proclaimed liberals and socialists, keep on regurgitating the ideas that good politics can make real life conditions better for the people, a lot of people start to seek fo for those parties that speak of the most problems at once and are the most forceful/authoritarian in trying to achieve those goals. Populism will always be the greatest threat to democracy. Some forms of populism end in economic crisis. Others end with camps and national sham. Fear people who say they want to kill the rich right along side those who demonize immigrants. Of course. But that doesn't mean it won't happen if you don't change the eco-social conditions that make people demand these desperate solutions. One thing that I believe most "educated people" don't understand is that there aren't half as many dumb people as they believe there are. People understand very well what they want and are quite capable of drawing conclusions on the basis of what they have been told and what they have experienced. If you tell people for decades that "this is their country" and "they can demand whatever they want from politics because of democracy", you will end up with people that vote against "sharing" their country. And if they can't vote against, they will believe they have the moral high ground, even if it takes doing the most cruel things to those that they believe are intruders. If you tell people year after year after year "how great we are all doing economically", then they will ask you for "their share" and if not they will seek for their share where they believe they can find it, which is they will demand it from "the rich". Such things aren't stupid conclusions, they are highly logical by what the people are being told. The only solution I see to this is to empower everyone individually. You can't replace individual responsibility and consent to laws, trades and state decisions with the power of "liberal" or "social" governments, "free" press and whatnot. These are illusions. They are important ingredients for a free society, but they cannot work if more and more people believe with good reason they don't have control over their lives, their lands and their politics anymore. You state this as fact, but provide nothing to back up that claim. All the ideas you references, including individualism are constructs. They are no more real than the concept of freedom. And coming from the land where we god damn worship the idea of personal freedom, there is no salvation there. Only the prosperity gospel and a worship of an ethereal meritocracy that reward the worthy. What you are hinting at is faith in democratic systems and governance, which no amount of individual liberty will provide. Especially in the information age where state actors from other nations undermine that faith. Or people within your country that point to the immigrant and claim they are harbingers of your disenfranchisement within our own nation. Because where I am from, the people yelling about immigrants coming to take away jobs and change our culture are funded by the staggeringly wealthy that just hoping they can fly under the radar for one more election.
The backup to my claim is what you wrote about the laws against racism created by other generations and how they become less accepted by the next generations.
Why? Because those people didn't gave consent, they weren't born. And this can be extended to many more laws. You can't suceed making vast amounts of other people happy, you lack the time and information to do so. What you can try to do is to create a world that everyone enters in a way, that regardless who they are they have similar and free conditions and a basic net of social security, even when they don't have their personal networks.
And no, you don't have a lot of individualism left in America, as far as I can tell at least. You have a state that proclaims to be the land of the free, while it guarantees 1% of the population 50% and more of control over all material things. I don't see the difference between this and some soviet party upper 1% that tries to control the country. Especially since the ones controlling the land have grown suspiciously close to the ones guaranteeing for the land. With the repercussions being pretty similar to the soviet system: poverty, falling growth rates, corruption etc. (not that the rest of the Western world would develop much differently)
|
Please Big J, anyone in the US can choose to run for office and sell out to corporate interests in order to elected. It's the land of the free.
|
On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era.
The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new.
What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity.
The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone.
When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble.
|
On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble.
In the 1990s we all talked about how the internet was going to bring the world and people together. It was short sighted to not ask what would happen when it brings the worst of humanity together. In the 2000s when I was making edgy, dark jokes on the internet with other people, I never really thought that some of the people I was talking to believed that stuff. The “its just the internet, its always been this savage” argument seemed true. It never dawned upon me that people truly invested that argument just wanted a safe space to be a garbage human and face no consequences. But I got clued in once lots of people started saying "you can't really stop death threats and the people sending them don't mean it. They are not credible death threats."
|
It has brought people together, people in general but also extremists closer to each other. I still think its a net benefit but vocal minorities can now be louder and reach more people than ever.
|
On February 01 2018 03:07 Velr wrote:
It has brought people together, people in general but also extremists closer to each other. I still think its a net benefit but vocal minorities can now be louder and reach more people than ever.
I would argue that social media, mob based surfacing of information and services like youtube are the bigger problem for the modern internet. I love reddit when it is fun, but content surfacing by the masses is a terrible plan. Same with twitter and facebook. We were fine until these services pushed into the news and traditional media market and started getting pushed stories by the willing the mob. They called it crowd sourcing, but its tyranny of the majority way too much power. And the social media sites can’t correct this issue. They have created money making monsters than are beyond their control. Facebook was being used to direct violent mobs a couple countries, just like the radio was used for the same purpose before. And when Facebook was told, it became abundantly clear they had no idea it was going on.
But this goes back to my distance from WW2 and lack of context for our parents generation argument. Post WW2, every nation feared the power of propaganda and media. They saw what it could do first hand. Laws were written and people kept a watchful eye on media companies. The internet is one of the most powerful propaganda tools that can exist, especially with all the information we dump into facebook. But we lack the fear of it. It is a thing that makes the book “A Brave New World” look completely possible and there is no concern about its growing power.
|
On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble.
Define Conservativism.
|
On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism.
Its a lot like a Scotsman, but way more honest and truthful.
|
On February 01 2018 03:15 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 03:07 Velr wrote:
It has brought people together, people in general but also extremists closer to each other. I still think its a net benefit but vocal minorities can now be louder and reach more people than ever. I would argue that social media, mob based surfacing of information and services like youtube are the bigger problem for the modern internet.
In a nutshell the issue boils down to everyone being able to find people who align with them, no matter what issue, while also being able to try and influence everybody else. This mechanism can make for amazing things, build friendships and positive communities - but it can also bring together criminals, extremists and all kinds of groups that simply weren't able to organize as efficiently and gain an audience as easily as before.
I would go as far as saying all of this was fine until a certain point - however once you add more and more complexity to any system it will eventually behave more and more chaotic. In 2008 there were 100 million (active) FB accounts worldwide, in 2010 there were 482 million. Now we're at 2 billion of them, 1/4th of the people living on earth. Even with a decent chunk of those being non-human that's a lot of people who are influencing each other.
Reddit is it's own beast entirely because it managed to combine the tyranny of the majority with the chaos and the fact that narratives on there are extremely easy to control by very few people. That's great for pictures of cats and memes but an absolute disaster for anything where more nuanced discussions could actually be useful or are even desperately needed.
But this goes back to my distance from WW2 and lack of context for our parents generation argument. Post WW2, every nation feared the power of propaganda and media. They saw what it could do first hand. Laws were written and people kept a watchful eye on media companies. The internet is one of the most powerful propaganda tools that can exist, especially with all the information we dump into facebook. But we lack the fear of it.
I think what need to accept is that the internet as a whole and specific internet platforms individually behave like every single human tool we ever built: They can be used for positive purposes and nefarious ones. The hard part is going to be how we can figure out which are which and - even harder - how we as societies can and want to regulate them. The issue here is that most proposals and/or actual attempts to bring governments into this have been a complete mess. The EU does bits and pieces here and there but all in all governments across the globe simply joined the fray and tried to use it to grab onto more power instead of dealing with it responsibly.
Any tool that can be used by pretty much anyone for whatever purpose they see fit has such crazy potential that we should at least show it the respect it deserves. In the meantime we all got comfortable with using it like five year olds who found daddy's workshop.
|
On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism.
When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom.
While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values.
To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!"
One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see.
|
On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see.
The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own.
I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies.
There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago.
|
On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago.
These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing.
Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended.
Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for.
Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end.
|
On February 01 2018 06:47 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago. These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing. Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended. Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for. Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end.
You are starting with the assumption that there are big common societies. But societies are formed by values that the members share. My point is that these societies, these "we"-organizations aren't there to the degree you assume them.
The liberal/nationalist painting was just an example and I didn't value one over the other in that example. I merely wanted to point out that there are societies within our states that simply don't want to share the values with other societies at this point. The values that you want to defend are not values of sufficient amounts of people to begin with.
|
On February 01 2018 08:13 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 06:47 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 04:40 Big J wrote:
I live in a country where 25% of the people are voting for an outright nationalsocialist. A guy that used to go on simulated war exercises, on Nazi activist tours, that interupted a theater performance that was critical of Austria's role in Nationalsocialism, whose mentor was a Nazi underground leader in the 80s. A guy who gets called out by a part of his "fans" everytime he half-arsed condemns the crimes of the Third Reich.
Tell me again how it works. Amaze me. Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little. One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago. These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing. Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended. Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for. Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end. You are starting with the assumption that there are big common societies. But societies are formed by values that the members share. My point is that these societies, these "we"-organizations aren't there to the degree you assume them. The liberal/nationalist painting was just an example and I didn't value one over the other in that example. I merely wanted to point out that there are societies within our states that simply don't want to share the values with other societies at this point. The values that you want to defend are not values of sufficient amounts of people to begin with.
Could you show evidence of a society in the EU for example in which a majority of the population disagrees with basic things like "democracy/religious freedom/the free press are good things" on a fundamental level?
|
On February 01 2018 03:54 r.Evo wrote:
however once you add more and more complexity to any system it will eventually behave more and more chaotic. In 2008 there were 100 million (active) FB accounts worldwide, in 2010 there were 482 million. Now we're at 2 billion of them, 1/4th of the people living on earth. Even with a decent chunk of those being non-human that's a lot of people who are influencing each other.
This is backward. We aren't adding more complexity to the system, there's deviance/disorder/noise ("chaos") introduced which then leads to increasing complexity (if the system hasn't collapse from too much deviance/disorder/noise).
Any tool that can be used by pretty much anyone for whatever purpose they see fit has such crazy potential that we should at least show it the respect it deserves. In the meantime we all got comfortable with using it like five year olds who found daddy's workshop.
The first step to "giving it the respect it deserves" is to go beyond the naive conception that a medium is "a tool" -- that we somehow shape it while it doesn't shape us. What we produce and use produces us in return: retroaction/recursion and auto-poesis are defining factors of complex, living systems.
|
On February 01 2018 11:15 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 08:13 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 06:47 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:On January 31 2018 05:01 Plansix wrote:
[quote]
Well WW2 was close to 80 years ago and most the people who lived through it have passed on. The laws and prohibitions worked for all of that time in one way or another. But now we have reached the era where people have no context for the 1930s, which the Nazis came to power. So the law and other like it worked for a really long time, but at some point your country collective dropped the ball at little.
One of the things we need to wrap our heads around is that the people who lived through WW2 were a big factor in why fascism wasn’t able to take root again. Not the laws, or education. Just people leaning on one of the most disruptive and harmful events in modern history as evidence, stopping those ideas from ever taking root again. Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago. These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing. Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended. Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for. Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end. You are starting with the assumption that there are big common societies. But societies are formed by values that the members share. My point is that these societies, these "we"-organizations aren't there to the degree you assume them. The liberal/nationalist painting was just an example and I didn't value one over the other in that example. I merely wanted to point out that there are societies within our states that simply don't want to share the values with other societies at this point. The values that you want to defend are not values of sufficient amounts of people to begin with. Could you show evidence of a society in the EU for example in which a majority of the population disagrees with basic things like "democracy/religious freedom/the free press are good things" on a fundamental level?
For example there are various polls around that show strong support for "a strong leader". Here is one about Austria that explicitely asks about "a strong leader who does not have worry about parliament or elections". (29% agree)
That's from 2014 and I know that in my country support for such questions have risen up to 50% in the past 1-2 years. (Although the question might not have been explicitely against democracy)
http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/three-in-10-austrians-want-strong-leader-survey
Outright attacks on the media by certain parties and governments are becoming quite normal. One would expect that if people actually shared values like the free press they would never vote for these parties. But apparently this is not half as fundamental of a value to many if not most people as you believe it is.
|
On February 01 2018 16:10 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 11:15 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 08:13 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 06:47 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:
[quote]
Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago. These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing. Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended. Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for. Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end. You are starting with the assumption that there are big common societies. But societies are formed by values that the members share. My point is that these societies, these "we"-organizations aren't there to the degree you assume them. The liberal/nationalist painting was just an example and I didn't value one over the other in that example. I merely wanted to point out that there are societies within our states that simply don't want to share the values with other societies at this point. The values that you want to defend are not values of sufficient amounts of people to begin with. Could you show evidence of a society in the EU for example in which a majority of the population disagrees with basic things like "democracy/religious freedom/the free press are good things" on a fundamental level? For example there are various polls around that show strong support for "a strong leader". Here is one about Austria that explicitely asks about "a strong leader who does not have worry about parliament or elections". (29% agree) That's from 2014 and I know that in my country support for such questions have risen up to 50% in the past 1-2 years. (Although the question might not have been explicitely against democracy) http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/three-in-10-austrians-want-strong-leader-surveyOutright attacks on the media by certain parties and governments are becoming quite normal. One would expect that if people actually shared values like the free press they would never vote for these parties. But apparently this is not half as fundamental of a value to many if not most people as you believe it is.
well tbh in Austria we have had a coalition government between two parties that outright hate each other and really did more working against each other than with each other. I blame these two the most for the strength of the FPÖ
|
Fundamentally, humans aren't any different from people 2000 years ago.
We want to be able to start a family in safety. This means being able to provide for them and ourselves (food, water, shelter, etc). Beyond that, all bets are off.
The idea that free press, democracy, etc, are all fundamental to our society is something that exists only in the minds of elitists, intellectuals, etc. Not so much in the minds of common people.
|
On February 01 2018 16:10 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On February 01 2018 11:15 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 08:13 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 06:47 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 04:53 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 04:06 r.Evo wrote:On February 01 2018 03:46 Big J wrote:On February 01 2018 02:45 r.Evo wrote:On January 31 2018 05:26 Plansix wrote:On January 31 2018 05:17 Big J wrote:
[quote]
Yes, exactly. A law that has no support makes little sense. You can't hold up laws that go against people's interests. It's the same as with social issues: you can't keep up a law that prevents rents from going up if it is against capital interests and you can't prevent Nazism from rising by forbidding it. In both cases you have to deal with the underlying problems, the things that make people seek for authoritarians that "clean up the mess" that other people are making against their interests. That was never my argument. The law was fine. Fascist ideas are pervasive and appealing to people and cannot be countered simply debate or “better ideas.” And for decades they were not a problem because countries limited the ability for people to promote them on mass. Then the internet came and people saw it as this “disruptive” element that bypassed the old conservative conventions about media. And media was the vector that fascists used to great effect back in the 1930s. We dropped the ball because people in the 1900s and 2000s thought we were beyond worrying about it. The same dumb argument that claimed the US was in a “post racism” era. The connection between the internet and these recent political shifts can't be understated. The ideas we are seeing that are pushing into the mainstream aren't anything new. Far-right groups "rebranding" themselves to find ways to become more accepted into society is nothing new. What is new is that society is flooded with information, allowing for the ability to cherrypick facts that fit with ones emotions. What is new is that all of us are so much more interconnected that things can change faster and less predictably than ever before, simply because the system as a whole increased in complexity. The thing we could use the most during a time like that are conservatives in the truest sense of the word, because the values our societies evolved to over the last 70+ years are what defines the societies that most of us love in the end. From that angle one can easily expose what most of these far-right groups actually are: Regressive revolutionaries who want to get remove some of some of our basic values and replace them with those from a time we thought gone. When mainstream conservatives push closer to their positions or when those groups can successfully brand themselves as "true conservatives", that's when we'll be in deep, deep trouble. Define Conservativism. When I referred to "conservatives in the truest sense of the word" what I meant is caring about conserving our absolute core values, those that the vast majority of the political spectrum will agree with and that are behind all the other issues that are more open to debate. That goes from caring about preserving democratic structures and education over protecting the free press all the way to ensuring religious freedom. While all of these are true for most parties across all lines they should be the criteria by which people who consider themselves conservative can differentiate themselves from far-right reactionaries who are looking to make it acceptable to push against these kinds of core values. To put it into a more recent example, that's the difference between trying to argue for finding ways to keep the amount of new refugees as low possible and standing up and saying: "Don't buy from Turkish people!" One is a completely valid perspective that can be in line with our core values, the other attacks them in ways that should be unacceptable to everyone who cares about our system as a whole and/or is aware of the historical context of that kind of phrase. While society as a whole needs to push back against stuff like this I'd say there's more responsibility on the right side of the spectrum to make the difference abundantly clear for everyone to see. The reason those core values that YOU (not "we) want to see preserved are so heavily under attack is that a lot of people do not consent to them. Many people want to be allowed to be proud of "not buying from Turkish people". Few people with tons of power don't want to pay for other people's children education and want private elite schools for their own. I believe your argument is building too much on a romantic view. There is no "we" if people don't give their consent to being a part of "we". That's why liberals don't want to be part of nationalist societies that they don't share values with and nationalists want "their" liberals to work for the "good of the nation" and prevent other people from entering "their" societies. There is no magic "we". A society can always only be built on consent, and that has to be worked for. It's not just magically there, because someone wrote a law about it 100-years ago. These are indeed our societal values until the point at which we as a society decide to do away with them. If we want to keep it that way, we need to fight for them, not just whenever they're violated or attacked. If we don't care about them we can either join the people who want to get rid of them as well or stand idly by which, as we know from history, amounts to exactly the same thing. Where I fully agree with you and what is something we've been slacking with for a while now is that these things have to be worked for. Freedom, democracy and all those other glorious words aren't just things that you start once and which keep on going - they need to be continuously renewed, encouraged and defended. Where I vehemently disagree is with your painting of "liberal" and "nationalist": Nationalism isn't bad per se in all it's forms and not something people who we don't classify with as "nationalists" necessarily disagree with. It's specifically exclusive nationalism that is a major threat to our society as we know it. Inclusive nationalism is, while often not consciously celebrated, something a lot of people all across the political spectrum are advocating for. Case in point: Me calling some of those technically inclusive nationalist ideals core values of our societies. Whether we consider them worth defending is up to every community, state and nation by themselves in the end. You are starting with the assumption that there are big common societies. But societies are formed by values that the members share. My point is that these societies, these "we"-organizations aren't there to the degree you assume them. The liberal/nationalist painting was just an example and I didn't value one over the other in that example. I merely wanted to point out that there are societies within our states that simply don't want to share the values with other societies at this point. The values that you want to defend are not values of sufficient amounts of people to begin with. Could you show evidence of a society in the EU for example in which a majority of the population disagrees with basic things like "democracy/religious freedom/the free press are good things" on a fundamental level? For example there are various polls around that show strong support for "a strong leader". Here is one about Austria that explicitely asks about "a strong leader who does not have worry about parliament or elections". (29% agree) That's from 2014 and I know that in my country support for such questions have risen up to 50% in the past 1-2 years. (Although the question might not have been explicitely against democracy) http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/three-in-10-austrians-want-strong-leader-surveyOutright attacks on the media by certain parties and governments are becoming quite normal. One would expect that if people actually shared values like the free press they would never vote for these parties. But apparently this is not half as fundamental of a value to many if not most people as you believe it is.
That's the thing: These things are becoming quite normal for various reasons. You probably remember the last time someone pushed through with ~30% in a German speaking nation on top of these kinds of views. If the other 70% shrug their shoulders and accept this as the new norm then yeah, I agree with you: These aren't societal values anymore and it will only be a matter of time until we act on it.
I think part of the core issue is that we perceive the phenomena as something unusual because of how they're framed. A lot of the people who fundamentally disagree with these views are stuck trying to define when exactly lines are crossed because we were (rightfully so) taught that not accepting certain narratives in general and excluding them should be something we're careful with. That's what's being abused now.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
