I’m not from Infowars and I’m generally apathetic towards them. The couple good people they have over there balance out the craziness of Alex Jones, so I say the place is sort of split between useful and useless.
I don’t call myself labels like libertarian. I simply assert what I believe to be true. Labeling yourself and others gets you in trouble philosophically speaking. The small gain politically in labeling like that is bigly offset by the losses to the quality of thought and discourse.
When talking politics, rather than define ourselves and each other by labels, we should define ourselves and others by listing the three or four of our most important politically-relevant ideas. And be able to explain and argue for them.
The demonstrations against G7 or G20 are demonstrations against the globalism. And they are violent in every Western country.
If you want to see burning suburbs without any G7 or G20 demonstration, then go to France where suburbs burn every day.
G7 or G20 events are no argument at all for saying “the end of …”.
And by the way: It is more likely that the end of the Western world will come slowly.
Everything that has become is transient. Our Western plutocracy too. It is already fading. According to Oswald A. G. Spengler the plutocrats and its supporters - the democrats - will be defeated by the Caesars. And if our Western culture will not have any Caesar, then the plutocrats themselves will become the Caesars. The Caesarism is unavoidable according to Spengler. So the only alternative to that is the “sudden death” (by a huge catastrophe for example) of the whole culture. But are you seeing that catastrophe at the moment?
As you have demonstrated on other threads, you do not understand the degree of lying that is going on; “Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.” Even back in the 90’s, altering which car won the race (via video editing) was trivial. Today, public deception is a new-wave political methodology - just privately ask any politician.
… And frankly, the smoke did look fake. How would anyone really know without going there?
"German Special Police Forces (SEK) Saxony chief Sven Mewes described the harrowing police experience at the Hamburg G20 summit last week saying he had never seen such a level of violence directed toward police officers.
The SEK head said that the protesters intended to do as much harm as possible to the police in general and although his initial mission was to be on standby for potential terror attacks his unit had to be called in to help with the escalating violence. Mewes said that the violence he witnessed from the protestors, was “unbelievable” German broadcaster N24 reports (mobil.n-tv.de/politik/Dann-war-S … 34632.html)
Describing the events of the days and nights of “Welcome to Hell” protest which involved thousands of far-left extremists Mewes said, “from what I’ve seen, this was no longer a demonstration. This was much more advanced. I have been a police officer for over 30 years, I have never experienced such violence.”
Mewes justified the deployment of the special anti-terror squad saying, “that is why, for us, this was not a tactic against protesters, but against both criminals, and potential criminals who have tried to harm both police officers and the population in both life and limb – possibly even in a life-threatening manner.”
“The main task of special units is the rescue of endangered human life. And that is exactly what we did at the moment.”
The SEK groups, who worked with their Austrian equivalent CORBA, were tasked with reclaiming rooftops occupied by left-wing extremists who were throwing bricks and other objects at riot police.
The extremists on the roofs offered no resistance to the SEK teams according to Mewes. “Altogether we searched six or seven houses. There were, according to my remarks, 13 arrests,” he said.
The SEK chief also described many onlookers who were taping the violence on their mobile phones and said some of them even cheered on and encouraged further violence against the police. “This was a totally bizarre situation, absolutely unbelievable,” he said.
Almost 500 police officers were injured during the G20 riots, some with severe injuries like a fractured skull. The area in which the protests occurred also saw a massive wave of property damage where many cars were set on fire including various police vehicles and many shops were looted.
Before the riots, many shops are said to have paid protection money to extremist groups avoid damage and looting. Many shops paid 20 euros or more for a poster which signalled support for the extremists in return for protection. breitbart.com/london/2017/07 … ever-seen/
Black Blocks are anarchists (hence they dress in black) and anti-, well, -globalism and -capitalism for sure, yet anti- in general, and they can’t go any further. I guess they belong to a galaxy that calls itself “antagonist mouvements”.
They are violent against property and anyone who tries to stop their vandalism, but not against people per se. Actually, the only people I saw beaten in the footage you posted were the protesters. They fling rocks or bricks to the police, break shop windows, torch cars, don’t use firearms.
Note that, although vandals, they are not looters. It may not make them less despicable, surely some petty thefts were committed, but to their credit looting is not their policy.
This is not exactly what happened in England and Wales in 2011, when a much more colorful crew, with a less pronounced political profile, massively indulged their consumerism, especially in the form of tech gadgets, home appliances and clothes, if I remember well. I guess something similar takes place in the U.S. from time to time. Surely that is more spontaneous, but it does not really look preferable to me.
Your “sources” are evidently biased, it does not make them wrong, but neither it makes them reliable.
Sacrifice? I wish someone could say that.
In fact Europeans have “sacrificed” themselves a long time ago already. Probably since 1917, and definitely since Summer '45. But ‘sacrifice’ is too noble a word for people that are dithering, while being ‘comfortably numb’… It’s not tolerance, it’s apathy vested as civic virtue. I am not surprised at all some by-standers were cheering at confrontations between police and rioters. I guess they were not really aware of what they were doing, it was more like watching a porn clip.
There is an upside, nations are disappearing.
Fictional nations are taking the scene, and the fiction goes on by staging a struggle for survival between then. In reality everything is lost already. Europeans are steadily approaching their extinction - and it happens for a reason, which is not conspiracy. Spengler saw it coming, the reference is most germane, and he died long before the first black block was born.
Europeans invented the idea of nation and of nation-state. Now, for the first time after the Roman Empire, Europe might find itself bereft of nations. Consequently, it is time to dismantle also the concept of state. If God is already dead, now it can well be the turn of the state, which is nothing else but “the march of God in the world”, Hegel said.
That said, a new Europe may replace the old one. If that ever happens, surely Black Blocks can claim no merit for it. On the contrary, they are damn useful to perpetuate the status quo.
Yet the notion of ‘status quo’ is no longer really applicable and it becomes every day more necessary to dismiss the worn-out historical categories used until now. Time can fly straight as an arrow, but history is more hyperbolic. It is clear that there is an ever increasing acceleration that is puzzling for most of us. Cherishing a still present or a mythological past is just delusional - and hypocrite.
I saw no inaccuracy of information reported in the article that I cited. If no looting occurred, then this fact (assuming it is relevant) was omitted or ignored or not noticed by those who wrote the article. Meanwhile many police were injured by black bloc members, some severely. Similar Antifa riots in France and the USA have shown extreme violence toward police, leading to many injuries. There is plenty of footage on youtube of Antifa gangs throwing rocks and bricks and even firebombs at both civilians and police in places like Berkeley, CA or Paris, France.
On the contrary, I think it is precisely a sacrifice, although indeed as you allude to not a noble one. A noble sacrifice would be one thing, but this one is indeed more… dithering, as you say, and the sacrifice is occurring to the postmodern gods of Tolerance and No-Thinking (“virtue signaling”). These new gods have taken psychic hold of at least a sizable number of the European people, and these same people are choosing to sacrifice their societies, their culture, their families, their friends, their future and their own lives in the name of these gods. It is indeed a sacrifice, and a not entirely unconscious one at that. In other words, they know what they are doing and why they are doing it, and many of them hate themselves for the cowardice it implies, but they feel stuck and unable to do otherwise. Just like the fear before an almighty god, they are not free to act what to them appears to be truth. Their instincts tell them one thing, their ‘social instinct’ another and their own body and speech, as they watch in horror, always follows the ‘social instinct’. A few more courageous people choose their actual instinct over artificial-socially constructed fear and sycophantism.
Then you will need to explain what the world or at least Europe will look like when nation states have disappeared, and why you consider that an “upside”. Hegel was not correct to equate the state with the march of God in the world; while that can certainly be one interpretation and often applicable, it isn’t a definitional case, certainly not exhaustive of what it really means to have a nation and a state in a logical or ontological sense; and as Heidegger said, only a god can save us, which on par with Hegel’s own level here is a direct repudiation of the implication that the nation state ought to disappear, especially if you factor in the insights of people like Jung as to what “god” really means.
I find a lot of mindless proponents of globalism on here, and elsewhere, parroting quasi-consciously about how evil nation states are and how glorious the coming global (communist) utopia will be. I will refrain from putting you into this category on the assumption that you can defend your above statements.
As for “Cherishing a still present or a mythological past is just delusional - and hypocrite”, this is not at all true. The past is what gives the present meaning, and what provides the grounding for future expectation. Mythology runs far deeper than mere delusion and fantasy. Jung points out that the archetypes of the collective unconscious manifest themselves as both symbols and allegories, in the case of symbols as immediate expressions of truths manifested as living human experience and insight, as an inexhaustible and arational mediation synthesis between the much larger unconscious sphere that surrounds the much smaller conscious sphere, and in the case of allegories is a kind of progressive transitioning and transformation of existing knowledge away from the purely mythological metaphysical and toward the more strictly objective, rational-factual. In this latter case, as with what has happened with Christianity, the symbols start to break down and war in their oppositional characters as the broader structure in which those symbols had existed is fragmented apart, this fragmentation being the result of the fact that people realize they do not think about the symbols anymore and have nothing to say about them. The Virgin Mary, the Trinity, the Divinity of Jesus, Heaven and Hell, Eden… when modern man realized these ideas were empty to him, when he could recall and interact with the idea and no amount of depth ensued as a result, no questions, no passion, no mystery, then those symbols lost their structural cohesion.
As Jung also points out, when this happens then new symbols are sought as means of representing the archetypal knowledge upon which human psychology are based. The Christians search for it in the Eastern religions, and the Easterners search for it in the Christian religion, for example.
We can overcome the specific mythological structures but that leads only to an even more fervent and desperate search for meaning, for symbols with which to express the deeper truths that comprise us psychologically and socially. In so far as scientific and philosophical ideas are purely intellectual and lack ‘spirit’, lack wisdom and depth, lack personality and gravitas, those ideas will be inadequate to act as new symbols in the new symbolic order and man will continue to stumble forward toward the meaningless, analytic superficial, postmodernist horror of death that awaits him. That seems to be what you are advocating, is it not?
The old Europe went out with the ancien regime, every sign since then has pointed to it. The old architecture will one day also disappear, visually the past will not be revisited, even by aesthetes. They will be reminders to some literary footnotes.
Politically, as the French Oresidents sudden embrace of Trump shows, by inviting him to Bastille Day, presents a feeling by France of her tenacity to hold on to some of the cultural signs.
It is truly an enigma, that globalism may yet enclose a new revival of the Roman Empire, bereft of its Middle Aged religious fervor.
Yes, but not in the absolute – economic materialism and civic nationalism always inform the structural cohesion of a society, are always necessarily present to some degree in any successful and stable society. But the problem is now these are being reified to absolute status, as ideologies for themselves, when in fact they are simply supportive elements within a much broader context.
What has precipitated the loss of identity? In a word, Marxism. The entire philosophy behind Marxism is an outright attack on identity, on values, on self-valuing, on community (oh the irony), and on the structure of society as such. Communism literally consumes its culture and society as ‘fuel’ with which to burn even more brightly the “revolutionary” fires of communism until there is not enough fuel left to burn that fire, at which point the old totalitarian power structures set in as a necessary attempt to keep some semblance of societal functioning going, to avoid descent into lawless anarchy. It is a pure emotional response, which is why Marx organizes the idea around the notion of class struggles. Black and white, binary, reified categories give the emotions the maximum chances of maximum expression and potency.
But we already know that communism fails, that Marxist ideology is a cancer that eats away and ultimately devours those cultures and societies in which it takes hold as a critical mass. Black bloc, antifa, SJWs, leftist professors, these types of course do not realize this, they still idealize the ‘utopia’. And thus they become useful idiots for those in real power who merely use the self-consumptive fires of communist ideology to “deconstruct” society and create conditions of deprivation, conflict, and war, all for the aim of reconfiguring culture and society in ways more conducive to the stable and expanded control of the power-elite, the very same people whom Marx (pretended?) to hate.
If Marx really hated the “capitalists, totalitarians, the power elite” then why did he devise a system that does nothing but burn up an entire society and culture in service to what are ultimately totalitarian power elite who inevitably end up owning all the capital? Either he was stupid beyond belief or he was just another wannabe elitist happy to see the world burn so long as his own sphere of influence and capital accumulation grows as a result. Well he was perpetually poor and fleeing his creditors, so perhaps this latter explanation makes the most sense.
And 98% of the Bolshevik revolution was directed by Jews. Later after world war II it was Marxist Jews from the Frankfurt school of Germany that descended upon the United States. Of course you won’t discuss this with your Jewish apologetics.
Not all Jews supported the Bolsheviks, and there were cultural and historical reasons why some Russian Jews did support it. For one, Russians had been committing racist attacks and pogroms against Jewish people for centuries, and kicking them out of the Russian Empire. The Jews in Russia were alternatively liked and hated by the Russian leaders, often used as scapegoats and for being ‘outsiders’ and non-Christians. Later the Soviets used Jews as a “victimized minority” and gave them privilege in the revolutionary communist government, while degrading the positions of non-Jewish Russians similarly.
There is an extensive history of abuse, violence, and extradition that Jewish people had to face in Russia. That history is the reason why the Jewish Russians were so split on communism; many supported it out of a desperate need to try and save themselves from constant violence by ethnic Russians and older Russian Tsarist leaders, but other Jews opposed it on moral grounds and even implored their fellow Russian Jews not to join the Bolsheviks, seeing how it would only incite more hatred of Jews by ethnic Russians. Of course those Jews who opposed the communists were correct.
I have already gone into detail about how stupid it is to label something like communism or the Frankfurt school “Jewish” just because many of its members were Jews. Would you label any other political or philosophical movement Christian merely because most of its members were Christian? Not likely. Because such a label is irrelevant, many Jewish people supported these causes and many opposed them. By trying to falsely equate Judaism itself with what some Jewish people did politically or in philosophy is just insane. Further evidenced by the fact that Bolshevism or Marxism were not promoting Judaism as theology or social practice, there was no push to make these fundamentally political systems into Jewish systems or groups. One’s religion isn’t determining of one’s political sentiments, and Marxist thought was already sweeping through Europe and Russia at the time, and gripped the minds of millions of people, some of them Jewish and many others who were not Jewish.
You are confusing religion with politics, a very dangerous conflation. But as I said, I have already addressed this nonsense, and you have yet to respond to that.
I can’t object to the article. I object about the videos, which was the first sources you used. I maintain those are biased. I am not implying that they refer to “alternative facts”, though I have some doubts, but that is neither information, nor analysis.
You are right about the fact that the absence of looting doesn’t change much the overall impact of the riots. I would even say that it allows to more easily compare Black Blocks to Nazi’s Brownshirts (I mean the SA). But that’s my point too, it’s not hooliganism, it’s politics. (Like on many other points, here I find myself exposed to objections. One could quip something like “and is not hooliganism politics too” and I would not really disagree. But let’s say that, in a more primary sense, Black Blocks are exclusively about politics, while hooligans are not).
I guess you want to mark this point because you want to say that ‘tolerance’ is becoming something like being erased the hands down. On the contrary ‘we’ have to react. Then the question becomes: ‘we’ who? react to what? and how?
If I have interpreted you correctly, please answer. (I presume I know the ‘who’ and ‘what’, but I would like to read the way you put it).
I don’t think that most people are tolerant - and I think they have never been, it’s always been conformism. Yet something has changed lately and tolerance is now publicly criticized. The rise of the so-called populists shows that your thoughts have a much larger echo than you seemingly think. Yet, does that make them “corageous”?
That cowardice is just that, or possibly the outcome of a long conditioning as you suggest, but not the side effect of a moral dilemma. We should also consider that in Europe the state has a constitutional monopoly of violence, all other forms (except self-defence, and not even exactly that) are illegitimate. Nevertheless, at least for some, the psychological dynamics that you describe might well take place. Honestly, to me it looks more like “ideology” than “genealogy”, but, anyway, who are the “courageous people [who] choose their actual instinct over artificial-socially constructed fear and sycophantism”?
I can’t tell you what it will look like, I am not a prophet. Nor I am an optimist. I can understand it’s a scary idea, it may well lead to the ‘sacrifice’ of “their societies, their culture”, and possibly of the rest too. I guess that people in besieged Numantia had similar thoughts. I refer to this historical fact because it helps to explain why I consider that it is an upside.
What is remarkable about Numantia, or Numancia, is that its inhabitants committed collective suicide not to yield to Romans. That commands respect, of course, and no surprise if literature has made Numantians heroes. Cervantes wrote a tragedy where he established XVI century Spain as the descendant of Numantians.
Numantians have many ‘cousins’, e. g. Boudica in Britain and Vercingetorix in France (together with the glorified historical forgery of the Gallo-Roman nation). Those are examples of a mythological past that, I guess you would say, “gives the present meaning, and […] provides the grounding for future expectation”. I would not really challenge this view, I can understand the value of a founding myth, but I do discuss how this is employed “toward the more strictly objective, rational-factual”. Because if we appeal to this layer, to critical thinking, what is this past?
Numantians had apparently all reasons to oppose an invander that claimed a cut on their resources, even more so as they managed to defeat Romans several times. But these victories together with a naive understanding of economy (and the latter could not really be different) were probably what doomed then. Emboldened by their successful resistance, they failed to appreciate correctly their actual situation. Romans were never going to quit, they would keep coming at them with more forces and determination. We may call this hubris, but, whatever that was, one fact should have become clear if they could see the context as we now can: Rome’s expansion was unstoppable. And it’s not that they cherished their ‘values’ to the point of sacrificing their lives. Besieged, they did ask for peace, even for a less than honourable one. In the end they were willing to compromise their ‘values’ (obviously: this is ironic). But it was too late. Like Michael Corleone, Scipio answered: “My offer is this: nothing”. And that is what they got. There was no perpetuation of anything: no lives, no families, no friends, no culture. Nothing. It was their total anihilation. The memory of Numantia has remained only because of Roman historians and archeological excavations. In fact there has been no past giving meaning to the present, quite the contrary. The present assigned a pre-established meaning to a fictional past, based on actual historical events, but wrapped by an ideology that constitutes a falsification of them.
But having said that, your question “Why you consider that an ‘upside’” remains still unanswered.
It’s useful to forewarn that the concept of nation has remained undefined, so you may legitimately infer that I equate nations and peoples. Not necessarily.
Let’s remain in Spain. Pre-Roman Spain was home to several populations, they probably did not entertain the concept of ‘nation’, but be it as it might, it’s fair to say that their ‘identities’ were erased. When the Visigoths invaded Spain, they found just a Roman province, not oppressed nations. Even the very name of Spain comes from the Roman invader. How bad was it? Well, sure the Roman conquest broght suffering and destruction, loss of lives, families, etc. Yet Spain did not become a desert. The overall conditions of Spain improved so much, that many parts of Spain found again a comparaple affluence only a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire. It is indeed that Dominion that cast the foundation of what Spain became, not the Numantians. Cervantes did not write his tragedy in Celtiberian, he used a language derived from Latin. It’s fair to object that we can’t discern what the alternatives could have become. Yet there are 2 supporting points in my view: a) without this massive erasure of ‘identities’ operated by the Roman Empire (which, by the way, it’s better understood as absorption) we would have never had a Europe; b) as much as this sounds politically incorrect, and possibly methodologically unfeasible, we should question the value of these erased cultures. My take is that those identities were doomed to exctintion anyway, they thrived (if they ever did) only because of a relative isolation.
I am not going to develop (b) here, but consider anyway that oblivion was not the only possible outcome. There are examples where subjected people grew with a greater identity. Greeks perceived them not exactly as a nation, but surely as a people. Their political autonomy was over by the IV century B.C. Yet that resulted in a huge enabler for their ‘culture’, which became hegemonic in the the Balkans and the Middle East until the X century AD, and even beyond, in time and space, because there would be no Europe if there were no Greeks. They are so incredibly resilient (which, frankly, one would hardly guess), that, while Latin is dead, Greek is alive and kicking after 25 centuries. Then there would be the case of Jews, that would be even more significant, yet… enough said on this.
The ontology of the nation and state? Please, tell me more about it.
I would expect that Hegel exhausted the case as he used to exhaust his readers, but the reference was made because the Ethical State, à la Hegel, cannot longer afford its task, in my view, as long as it remains on the scale of one nation. Then maybe you should develop the rest, because I fail to see how this saving god is a “direct repudiation of the implication that the nation state ought to disappear”. Besides, I would not say that Hegel developed his doctrine about the nation state, but about the state only, that which was sufficiently convenient for Prussia. As for Jung, sorry, I can’t factor in something I don’t know. I confess I remain a bit perplex seeing psychoanalisis and “really” in the same statement. And who are the other people like Jung?
I maybe should clarify my thought, if that is what you are asking. I just declare a few things to prevent misunderstandings.
Fear not, I am neither utopian, nor dystopian. John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is by no means my favourite lyrics.
I am not an atheist because God is not sufficiently moral, like one could (and should) say of Hitchens. So I don’t think the nation state “ought” to disappear in any moral sense. Instead, the nation state is no longer zukunftsfähig, it can’t do what it promises (just like Christianity). As for “the cold monster” in itself, viz. the state, that may be well supranational, and in fact there are some, typically in the form of (con-)federations and unions. I believe that the end of the Ethical State is in order too, but I might be deadly wrong, in fact I guess that as of now I don’t see many signs pointing to that.
Does that make me one of the “mindless proponents of globalism”? I might be mindless, but I am definitely not a proponent. There is a couple of awful truths that it would be mindless to ignore: globalism has already happened and it’s inevitable unless major catastrophes having the impact of a nuclear war. Globalism in economy has started with the Seven Years’ War, if not earlier, and it was a European invention. Second: demographically Europe is dying. It is no longer the land of the white.
That’s beautiful, but I do not see most of it to the point. You establish a correlation between Jung and nation-states that I fail to grasp.
On the other side, this sentence
could be applied to nation-states. As you acknowledge in a way:
As for the rest, I believe you may find my point of view in my exposition of the Numantia case. It is opportune to add that the case portrayed is not a perfect match for ‘our’ situation. There is this idea of siege, yet it is not comparable to the Roman army. That which makes it even more unstoppable in a way, also because Europeans partake in that dynamics. So maybe ‘resistance is not futile’, I might correct myself in this after your objections (as a mere possibility, it depends heavily on how this resistance factually takes place), but I still believe it’s hypocrite.
I can’t tell what I lack, or lack not. I don’t think dissecting the semantics of ‘spirit’, wisdom and depth, personality and gravitas is conducive to to a proficuous debate.
I think that forms of mindless, ‘Numantian’ conservativism will take to delusional “grounding for future expectation”. It will result in self-inflicted mutilation, downward spiralling, not empowerment. I can detect only adrenaline, not analysis “toward the more strictly objective, rational-factual”. If I check on it closely, I do not even find it consistent.
What about them is biased? They are accounts from people who were actually there, and who were stalked and attacked by leftist mobs.
Often the instincts of hooliganism find easy manifestation and an excuse for outlet in ostensibly political situations and sentiments. A violent mob throwing bricks at police and burning cars and shops is a violent mob throwing bricks at police and burning cars and shops whether the most common underlying motive of the mob-member is general lawlessness and criminality or is politically-incited rage.
An instinct for freedom, individual responsibility and freedom from government and “big brother” is a natural instinct. As is the instinct to conform also natural, but increasingly Orwellian Leftist tyrannical governments such as ours in the west today will seek to make use of the latter of those two instincts because it breeds conformity and meekness, cowardice and “tolerance”. Indeed I think most people are naturally tolerant, i.e. have a natural libertarian bent (you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone; let’s all be free to do as we please so long as no one is being harmed by it), but cultural Marxism has taken advantage of this basic human instinct and compassion toward others, particularly by co-opting the maternal instincts that are stronger in women than in men, for the purposes of social control and alienation. Real tolerance is good, the fake tolerance of the modern leftist is very bad. And these “tolerant” leftists are being made to tolerate their own demise, the loss of their minds, the rape and killing of their own children. That isn’t tolerance, it is mind-death.
The courageous ones are anyone who stands up against all that, at risk of public censure and attacks from the media and pop culture, indeed even at risk of personal safety. Anyone who stands for truth is by definition necessarily courageous.
And yet that is the exact opposite of what is happening in Northern and Western Europe right now, where they are committing collective suicide precisely to yield to the invaders.
I was referring specifically to how the nation state acts as a means of further disseminating and protecting culturally significant mythologies and psychological types and knowledge, as well as ideas and knowledge generally. The nation is a collective form of similarity amongst the people who share either a geographic and/or historical-anthropological space with each other, thus a kind of derivative structure of protection and an “outer shell” that allows culture in sum and individuals within cultures further means of surviving and thriving. Nations are philosophical concepts of unification that act analogously to what the individual personality and ego is for the sum total of the psyche of any one person: the psyche is vast and diffuse, heterogeneous, confused, conflicting, but the individual ego and personality appear as a principle of unification establishing sanity and individuality over the psyche as a whole. This exact same logic is at work in the nation with respect to the plurality, irreducibility, difference and heterogeneity of the people of a culture and society. Thus is the ontological explanation for what nations are and why they are important.
Having a nationless global state is impossible because humans are far too different when you extrapolate out far enough along geographic, linguistic, cultural-anthropological, religious, etc. lines. Nations naturally cohere a given size and shape over time and constantly negotiate that with themselves, and negotiate it with other nations too, but at the point a nation gets too large it destabilizes due to the failure of overlap between the legal-symbolic reach of the nation and the underlying peoples, cultures, geographies, values, etc. that the nation is supposed to represent.
Am I supposed to infer that with the Islamic third world (essentially what are largely medieval people by the tens of millions) conquering modern secular Europe is, you think, going to somehow end up being beneficial?
And yes I also noticed that you didn’t answer my question. But now your answer seems simply to be: ‘well maybe it will work out ok in the end.’ I really hope you’ve thought this through a little more than that. A defense of nationless globalism or of mass Islamic immigration into Europe is going to need a much stronger foundation (I believe such a position is indefensible, yet the onus is still on you to actually… defend it, or agree with me that it is indefensible in which case you would not be implying that the loss of nations is somehow a good thing.
I went into it above in this post, please use that.
That’s not what I’m arguing. I want inter-national cooperation and agreements, trade, alliances, common shared goals, but that doesn’t presuppose the loss of nations themselves and rather, obviously, requires nations to continue to exist.
Ideas are tested for being good or bad when the conditions for testing are present. In the USA this is done by way of the federalist system of the 50 states each of which is an independent semi-sovereign government, so that the people are free to move from state to state as the consequences of policies of one state may be seen and avoided by other states. In essence each American state is a mini nation, united under one federal government in which the 50 nations participate. I would very much like to see something similar appear at a global level, but it requires a strong affirmation of the principle of states rights in order to work. You can’t have two or more entities agreeing or testing competing ideas and values if you don’t have… entities. The loss or undermining of national sovereignty that the EU and neoliberal globalism represents is antithetical to the very conditions that allow human political thought to progress and evolve over time. Indeed, single states with absolute undifferentiated power become the most tyrannical, and what is the popullar notion of stateless globalism but, just like the delusion of stateless communism, except advocating the creation of but one State? The USSR found out what that is like.
Separation of powers is critical. At the geopolitical level that is achieved by, among other things, the principle of national sovereignty and the right of different peoples and cultures to have different nations, so that they may govern themselves.
There aren’t many. William James or Nietzsche to some degrees, but beyond that I don’t think there are others I can think of.
Then you’re demanding a standard of perfection that cannot exist. Nations, or religions, do as they are supposed to do, but they do it imperfectly. The idea is to keep improving these things over time, not give up on the entire project as you seem to want to do.
You’re conflating demography with skin color alone? What of age? A recent MIT study found there is no correlation between per capita GDP and an aging population. As for “whites”, European people ought to value their European ancestry and heritage, rather than be made ashamed of it as the leftists would like. Every race and culture (they’re not so easy to tease apart as we might like) on earth seems to be granted a right to be proud of itself, value itself and maintain an in-group preference, except for one: Europeans (and now spreading to Americans also, although America can be reasonably seen as an extension of Europe).
As for globalism, as I already mentioned I want more global cooperation s and agreements, so long as that doesn’t involve supernational global one world government that exists at the expense of the sovereignty of individual nations.
Maybe with my further elaborations here you can begin to grasp it now.
Sorry but I entirely lost the train of your argument or point here. Please clarify.
Then that’s a big problem for you.
Why not? I’m trying to get across the vast difference between proper thinking and improper thinking. Empiricism and analytic positivism are not philosophies, and certainly not religions even if they do try to usurp the void left by religion’s depowering in modern society.
Science is all well and good, but what we really need is philosophy. It isn’t for a lack of science that the west is falling, but rather from a lack of philosophy.
If you’re saying that populist nationalism rising in Europe and the US is inherently self-defeating, then I disagree. It is a proper check against the radical rise in Marxist leftist ideology. As even Zizek has noted, to his dismay, it is the political Right that seems to have aligned with the “common man” working class and its values.
I am very happy about Brexit, but very unhappy with all the stalling tactics the neolib and neocon globalists are using to try and prevent it.
Southern starts by saying that ‘people’ were attacked in the streets while the ‘whole town’ was devastated. Molyneux then invites Southern to tell if she was targeted by attackers, adding that people just standing and shooting photos were attacked. It seems that the targeting and attack was this: Southern wore an ‘Identitarian’ shirt (but she was not aware of what she was wearing…) and went out to watch the march of protesters; one single person, probably because he saw the shirt, yelled (in German) at her. Then a ‘mainstream media’ journalist working for Die Zeit (which then turned out to be false) took a picture and signaled her presence in Hamburg to the antifa via twitter. Since then she was actually tracked and had to hide. Moreover, one guy who unfortunately appeared next to her in a photo, was attacked. He stood kneeled on the ground his hands up imploring “I am not a Nazi, I am not a Nazi…” while, Southern says, “these people were hitting him and beating him”. A video clip of this should be available on heavy.com, I searched the site to no avail. I found this instead. It is reasonable to believe it contains the footage Southern refers to. That scene does not fit Southern’s description. One may say it shows intimidation, possibly threatening, but not beating and hitting as she said.
While the tweets exist (some are shown, I could not read them, also because they are in German), the footage Southern shows to support the claim of an active threat is not conclusive, you just see a backyard. And if she was constantly tracked, that becomes even quite mysterious, seeing that others were indeed attacked (and that seems to be the only documented instance of people attacked while shooting photos).
Now, that has to be absolutely clear: I am not attempting in the slightest to defend trackers and aggressors. There is one Sören Kohlhuber who is seemingly at the beginning of the chain of tweets: sue him. Frankly, it would be strange if they have not done it yet.
Having said that, in my view the scale of all this has been deliberately exaggerated, possibly also to show that the whole antifa complex is a criminal ‘leftist mob’. All ‘mainstream media’ sources stated violent confrontations involved about 10-15% of protesters, not all of them.
I think there’s a little abuse of the word ‘instinct’. If that is just a mere rethorical figure, then do as you like, but a natural istinct to "freedom from government and ‘big brother’ " must have remained latent for thousand and thousand of years, as there were no such things for a long time. The first forms of government probably took place with the Agricultural Revolution, roughly 12’000 years before 0 AD, while the sapiens were already roaming the planet long before then. And even with the Agricultural Revolution, I do not see a lot of exertion of this natural instinct… Then it seemed to me that you previously referred to an “artificial-socially constructed fear and sycophantism” in the case of conformism.
Anyway, how come we are infested by leftist governments and the Socialist and Communist parties are only seldom part of them? What is your definition of ‘tyrannical’? because that sounds kind of unconstitutional in most countries. It is indeed surprising to learn that all Western governments are such. Save at least the U.K., they are bravely brexiting, fiercely opposing to the “the stalling tactics the neolib and neocon globalists are using to try and prevent it”.
OK, if tolerance is “you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone”, it may be as you say. I still think that it is however a convention, and conditioning, not a “natural libertarian bent”. The theory of the “long winters”, with which I suppose you are acquainted (Molyneux is), postulates that no one was left alone. The division of labour, which has been existing on a massive scale since the said Agricultural Revolution, does not really allow that. In the present, the overwhelming majority of us has a constant necessary exhange with other people. That too does not really allow leaving and being left alone.
I guess it implies that whoever oppose to the sacrifice “to the postmodern [god] of Tolerance” are the truth bearers.
Considering what you said above, about the “natural libertarian bent”, I suspect that the postmodern tolerance is something else. What exactly?
As I see it they are fading, not to yield to the invaders, but to their own… Well, it can be many things, probably all of them: consumerism, the dissolution of the traditional family, nihilism, boredom… It can be just the natural course of things. A herd too domesticated and with no shepherds (though I see that some research for them is going on). Or maybe not. It might become the end of a civilization, but not necessarily. “What does not kill me, makes me stronger”. It seems that this is what you are devoting your energy to in the end, believing that identitarianism, or something like that, is the way to fix it. Yes, I think it is self-defeating. Everything that it is totally backwards ends that way.
But would that be the only way? Considering that even the identitarians appear to be a multi-national community that tends to act globally, some doubts may rise, unless you are implying that the whole West is one nation. Surely, about the dissemination of knowledge, there Identitarians have a problem in my view. Until now I have seen them disseminating only conspiracy theories and flawed economics.
How the U.S, or Canada, or Australia are possible then? Russia is still multinational. I guess Putin is OK, is he?, so… it’s just because of him that it works?
If that is all you can retain of what I wrote, yes.
You can manage this thing, and resist this ‘conquest’ (which is not such). Australia, Canada, even UK and Germany, do that, with a mainly opportunistic attitude, but who cares, “beggars can’t be chosers”. Yet you can’t unmake it. We can discuss as long as we like about the philosophy of the nation, yet the fact is that these nations are dying . This is also the clarification requested, it’s not all of it, but I don’t want to get into more general views.
(By the way, their Middle Ages were a lot better than ours).
No.
There may be, and there should be, a separation of competences (possibly according to the infamous “principle of subsidiarity”). As for the rest, it is exactly what the US got rid of in order to become… the US.
And that applies also at how the EU is faring now.
I still see a difference between a “a standard of perfection that cannot exist”, and being no longer able to the execution of its office.
I don’t get the initial remark. Age is indeed the problem, and not excluvely for the economy.
I don’t know this study, I’d like to consult it. Anyway, I confess I am not surprised that the GDP per capita stays the same, or improves, for a while. There can be adjustment in productivity, and automatization is indeed doing that, and you can deny retirement until a very advanced age. However, that is just kicking the can. Eventually these people will need replacement. If there is not a sufficient stock of active population, there will be a contraction of the economy.
You can have a look at this if you wish.
I don’t discern the difference “between proper thinking and improper thinking” by decreeing what is ‘spirit’, wisdom and depth, personality and gravitas. I would ascribe those characteristics to what finds an echo in my most intimate thoughts, and I don’t want to get personal (“our deepest insights must - and should - appear as follies…”).
Ah, the old quote Hamilton trick, how tried and true.
Sorry man, but I can’t be bothered to respond to you. Maybe some other time, but it’s clear to me you have a vested interest in shutting down your mind, you seem like a typical academic, well used to rhetorics tricks and cherry picking and selective doubt, anything to avoid using language to actually… know something. At least to know something beyond the sphere of the accepted status quo (which concept I believe you rejected, right?)
Another dirty trick is equating the EU with the US federalist system, when in fact the various European countries are nothing analogous to the various American states. I actually have some great text on this issue and the economics of Europe and America with regard to “federalism”, if I ever feel motivated to respond properly to you I’ll post it.
But yeah, my loathing for academic dull newspeak and sycophantism far outweighs my desire to write a legitimate response here. I realize that’s unfair of me, so maybe I’ll bother writing one at a later time. But to be honest, I spent a good hour writing the last response to you, and you basically breezed by most of my points without so much as a glance toward the actual content there. Quoting Hamilton, and only Hamilton, is simply dishonest, that’s cheap NPR stuff. Making false equivalence between the EU and the US is also cheap anti-intellectualism. So no offense but I think I’ll take a pass for now.
