I am a stable genius

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peterlund
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Re: I am a stable genius

#61 Post by peterlund » Tue Jan 09, 2018 6:46 pm

Condescension wrote:
Tue Jan 09, 2018 6:22 am
Mind if I post all this on Shit Liberals Say?
Please define what kind of Liberals you are talking about, since this is the most dominant and important ideology practiced and implemented in many countries in the Western world and therefore there also are many strains/variants available of it.

- Modern/Social Liberals
- Classic Liberals
- Keynesian Liberals
- Economic Liberals
- Anarcho-capitalist Liberals / Libertarians

Roosevelt and his New Deal would be either Keynesian or Modern/Social Liberalism.

I suspect you are talking about the last version "Libertarians", but this is just theoretical shit liberalism in my mind as I stand for the first on the list.

If you need more details on this huge subject please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

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Re: I am a stable genius

#62 Post by Jeff Kuta » Tue Jan 09, 2018 8:51 pm

Libertarians have been oddly trying to portray themselves as "Classical Liberals" for some time now, even though that's a farce.

Here's an essay from 2006 (Dubya's 2nd term) that covers a lot of good ground.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/10/10 ... bertarians

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Re: I am a stable genius

#63 Post by President Eden » Tue Jan 09, 2018 10:08 pm

Jeff Kuta wrote:
Tue Jan 09, 2018 8:51 pm
Libertarians have been oddly trying to portray themselves as "Classical Liberals" for some time now, even though that's a farce.
Right-wing libertarians are pretty close to classical liberals. I'm not sure what understanding of either group leads you to believe this is a misleading characterization.
Left-wing libertarians are not classical liberals, but I don't think they call themselves classical liberals, either.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#64 Post by Tugster » Wed Jan 10, 2018 2:46 am

I am a registered libertarian, and it's misleading to use left-wing or right-wing at all when talking about Libertarians. My views are conservative on finances, and liberal on things like marijuana and marriages excetera, the basic principle is government should do as little as possible and let people live their own lives. I am also a retired military pilot, and I strongly believe that we should stop all the Foreign Wars, because they do more harm than good, and they cost a shitload of money for which we get nothing. The United States foreign policy has been a disaster for more than 50 years. I am also very pro-immigration. pretty much everybody in this country except the Native Americans came over at one point via immigration, immigration makes us stronger, people come to work and immigrants work hard.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#65 Post by TrPrado » Wed Jan 10, 2018 3:29 am

Okay well I guess if no one is going to tackle the heart of what’s off about Eden’s thinking I’ll do it myself.

There are a couple problems, first with the notion that the ONLY unifying psychological impulse of humans is to procreate, and the second is in regards to “societal cohesion.”

I think the primary reason Condescension has trouble arguing against it is because concepts that found liberal society are essential to argue against it, so it’s hard for him to simultaneously argue against those concepts and also against liberal, non-Marxist society.

1) I believe there is another impulse in humans that is more natural and ingrained than procreation: the concept that it is morally reprehensible to do harm to others. This is universal in all cultures, and any exception to any society’s rules regarding harming others are extremely circumstantial. These exceptions have long been in cases of punishment, divine intervention, or for the sake of national identity. Yet these government-endorsed excuses have always not been excused in conscience, as humans who do commit harm still feel remorse. Those who don’t are branded as freaks, psychos, and outcasts. This is a psychological and sociological fact, one that can be seen to branch out from evolution just as PE claims the impulse to procreate does.

Liberal society extends this notion to say that it is not only unacceptable for individuals to do harm, but also attempts to hold government to the same standard, except in punishing those who have, individually, done harm.

This is then branched out into enforcement of rule of law and equal protection thereunder for all its citizens, at least theoretically. And from there a non-authoritarian government makes more than plenty of sense as a moral system of government based in factual assessment of human psychology.

2) Social cohesion is a bizarre claim to levy. Keeping genes within a society and enforcing that ruins the gene pool. Look at the Habsburgs. A family of inbred royalty. Again it is essential to look at the counter offered by the foundations of liberal society.

While largely different in nature, I suggest we take a gander at the works of John Stuart Mill. The idea that different components of society are best merging instead of being left as reasons to go to war has always been central to liberalism, notably as suggesting that liberal society should operate by not caring about someone’s religion or race or other component, but not many classical liberal thinkers understood this as well as Mill (since Locke was notably anti-Catholic personally). Differences don’t hinder or eat away at cohesion, and can arguably IMPROVE it. Society is incapable of defining itself without understanding the sum of the whole, so suggesting that some of its different members are a drag on the therein undefined society is foolish.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#66 Post by President Eden » Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am

1) I believe there is another impulse in humans that is more natural and ingrained than procreation: the concept that it is morally reprehensible to do harm to others.
Only in context of the in-group. How else do you explain the routine practice, in most civilizations for most of history, of enslaving or murdering the populations of entire towns at the end of a siege? Is that not clearly harm? Yet this happened all over the world with regularity until the modern age. In some places of the world, the practice continues.
You can perhaps argue that every human society believes it is reprehensible to harm humans, that human societies in the past failed to acknowledge the humanity of other human societies, and that liberalism's unique triumph is in extending "the in-group" to all of humanity.
But then all you have established is that your culture must have come to accept liberalism before it is capable of abiding by this impulse. The natural conclusion is that societies which do not come to accept liberalism are, in varying degrees, incapable of abiding by this premise.
Perhaps you no longer need an explicit ethnic or religious tie to bind your community together, but all you've done is replace ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism. That's assuming that everyone in your society respects liberal values the way you do as well. You can look at the European migration crisis in Sweden, Germany, and France if you want to see what happens when you ignore cultural differences between people and don't properly convert them to a liberal point of view.
And from there a non-authoritarian government makes more than plenty of sense as a moral system of government based in factual assessment of human psychology.
My issue with liberalism is not that it is free, but that it does not appreciate fundamental differences that separate the world's cultures. It holds the individual as primary and disregards what we know to be true about our own tendency to group other people as in- and out-groups. I don't even think you need to be authoritarian to respect these things, just that the current state of liberalism is fundamentally unequipped for doing so.
Liberalism has only "worked as intended" in white, Western European societies, and in a couple of Asian states whose cultures overwhelmingly assimilated into Western life (Japan and South Korea, which still face heavy cultural and demographic issues directly resulting from mish-mashing honor-laden Eastern mores with highly-competitive capitalism, but which can be said to be examples of liberalism more or less "working as intended"). Where it has been spread to Russian states, African states, Latin American states, and Asian states outside of the two exceptions I listed, it has been adapted incompletely, the governments involved are highly prone to corruption, and in some cases (Africa and the Middle East are ripe with examples), the societies have collapsed into the exact sectarian violence and extrajudicial killings of out-group humans that liberalism tried to prevent.
This isn't to say that liberalism somehow is "only for whites" or that individuals from other races, even large numbers of those individuals, can't be assimilated into liberal societies. It is only to say that despite however universally compelling liberal, capitalist, Western ideas must seem to liberal, capitalist, Western people, they only have a track record of success in liberal, capitalist, Western societies, and that a blindness or worse, willful ignorance to this fact will lead these societies to their own undoing.
2) Social cohesion is a bizarre claim to levy. Keeping genes within a society and enforcing that ruins the gene pool. Look at the Habsburgs. A family of inbred royalty. Again it is essential to look at the counter offered by the foundations of liberal society.
I don't think you meant to straw-man this, but the Habsburgs are hardly a shining example of this principle in action. No one is advocating marrying cousins or sisters/brothers to keep the gene pool pure.
But there is little doubt that societies with one dominant ethnicity and faith are more stable than multiethnic or multireligious societies. The entire modern history of Europe is a shining example of this, and that's among people who, relative to humans outside of the continent, are more genetically similar and culturally and philosophically related. Funny you mention the Habsburgs, because the outbreak of World War I is the direct result of a multiethnic state failing to recognize the social tensions that came with that territory. I think it is completely uncontroversial to say that everyone involved would have been better off, had the Austrian Empire been peacefully split into nation-states for the large number of ethnicities within it, similar to how that region looks today. WWI as we know it wouldn't have happened.
Differences don’t hinder or eat away at cohesion, and can arguably IMPROVE it. Society is incapable of defining itself without understanding the sum of the whole, so suggesting that some of its different members are a drag on the therein undefined society is foolish.
I'm sorry but this part I boldfaced is nothing more than philosophical arrogance. Not you specifically, but liberalism specifically makes this mistake over and over again, with disastrous results. It is utterly ahistorical.
I'm not sure I follow your last sentence here. What "therein undefined society" are we talking about? Societies arise from people with similar outlooks on life living together in a close geographic space over a period of time. People choose to live together, or not, based on certain commonalities or differences. Those commonalities with each other, and differences from other groups in a different geographic space, are enshrined formally in the development of things like religious practices, cultural traditions, and eventually, as the concept of a state arises, law. If nations didn't follow such a pattern then you would have a point, I think, but they do, which means at no point in the formal determination of governmental philosophy is there some abstract "undefined society" -- societies emerge which need a state to handle certain issues, which means the determination of how that state is run only happens in the context of a society that already exists.
Maybe I should ask for an example. What state, whether lost to history or existing today, comes to you as an example of a state which does not follow this pattern?

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Re: I am a stable genius

#67 Post by TrPrado » Wed Jan 10, 2018 6:28 am

President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
Only in context of the in-group. How else do you explain the routine practice, in most civilizations for most of history, of enslaving or murdering the populations of entire towns at the end of a siege? Is that not clearly harm? Yet this happened all over the world with regularity until the modern age. In some places of the world, the practice continues.
No I recognize the history of the thing but also recognize the cause is not what you claim. The "in-group" is not necessary so much as a government that demands the enforcement of national identity.

For much of the same history, soldiers were forced to blindly carry out the will of their government. Humans still require the same demand to justify such harm based on national identity. And it is rightly viewed as primative.

An authoritarian government not bound to the same psychological principle as the extremely vast majority of humans leads to these sort of demands.
President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
Perhaps you no longer need an explicit ethnic or religious tie to bind your community together, but all you've done is replace ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism. That's assuming that everyone in your society respects liberal values the way you do as well. You can look at the European migration crisis in Sweden, Germany, and France if you want to see what happens when you ignore cultural differences between people and don't properly convert them to a liberal point of view.
Oh well this is only difficult to argue with because it's based almost entirely on false premises.

A) Several of the claims about the "crisis" are either fabricated or cherry-picked, and many of those don't even confirm themselves to be about refugees or migrants. Many of these ignore that if you look at any real information on migrant crime it's actually lower than the crime rates of locals.

B) "Liberal values" and a "liberal point of view" really only deal in how we view the role of government, not how we view how we're supposed to interact with the people around us. We are similarly psychologically ingrained as people in other cultures to do no harm. It's a HUMAN trait, not a CULTURAL trait.
President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
My issue with liberalism is not that it is free, but that it does not appreciate fundamental differences that separate the world's cultures. It holds the individual as primary and disregards what we know to be true about our own tendency to group other people as in- and out-groups. I don't even think you need to be authoritarian to respect these things, just that the current state of liberalism is fundamentally unequipped for doing so.
The most beautiful facet of liberal society is that it actually doesn't matter. I will also dispute that we have fully played out many places where it's been fully able to "work" let alone "as intended." Most countries have had heavy interference from Marxists and Imperialists. The Imperialists claimed liberal banners but went on a spree of pre-liberal concepts and invaded nations for mercantilist, not capitalist, aims. The first to be free were in Latin America. The Mexicans were among the more dedicated to liberal concepts, but faced attacks from a briefly hypocritical American government and then the French imperialist government. The weight outside forces place to burden these nations is the reason that Mexico, for example, has the nationalization of oil as a celebrated feat.

Through the 20th century, many nations were inspired to turn from Imperialist nations into the arms of Marxists. They have felt the need to assert authoritarianism as a defense mechanism. Liberalism is on a more international rise only in the age of modern globalism. Mexico, since doing away with the perpetuation of the PRI (and without dismantling that party or hindering its continued participation in the political realm) has pursued further and further liberalism and has seen an economic rise.

Liberalism is unifying, defying culture. I would again turn to Mexico, and look back to the invasion of the French. The defending government led by non-white Benito Juarez held liberal values, and the government in the United States, a nation that had previously invaded Mexico, was led by Lincoln, similarly of liberal values. The two leaders were highly fond of each other and the prospect of working together. And both succeeded in their shared crises, with the US even going out of its way to defend the liberal government of Juarez by telling France to bugger off.
President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
But there is little doubt that societies with one dominant ethnicity and faith are more stable than multiethnic or multireligious societies. The entire modern history of Europe is a shining example of this, and that's among people who, relative to humans outside of the continent, are more genetically similar and culturally and philosophically related.
I couldn't disagree more. The United States is far more multiethnic than Europe and is far more successful. It is actually the opposite that is true. Instead, nations that demand conformity to the ideas of the dominant are more likely to fracture than ones that are willing to embrace the different cultures within itself. Austria-Hungary actively suppressed Serbians, and in modern day fear of these other cultures is leading European nations to isolate themselves, which in turn leads to the splintering of Europe, which means a net decrease in success. Habsburgs not demanding to maintain their fragile grip on their suppressed subjects would have been far more successful in preventing that war than splitting up the Empire. I also feel obliged to note that none of the nations it would ultimately split into have been particularly successful, so this theory of the dominant ethnicity is a bit bunk. I would also point to the fact that the assassination only occurred because of this ethno-nationalism, and the war that followed similarly required the upholding of national ethnicity and Russia's constant assertions they would protect all Slavs that led to the war. The fixation on "dominant ethnicity" did far more to cause the war than multiethnicity of Austria-Hungary.

Liberal society is the key, once again. Do not fear the difference, and it incorporates itself into your success. This is how societal species like humans perpetuate themselves at their best, and it is executed best in the modern day by those who seek to perpetuate liberalism. This is also why the Muslim World was at its highest peak at the same time as when they willfully allowed Christian and Jewish citizens to be successful within their civilization.
President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
I'm sorry but this part I boldfaced is nothing more than philosophical arrogance. Not you specifically, but liberalism specifically makes this mistake over and over again, with disastrous results. It is utterly ahistorical.
Reread the above. The only places where you could possibly assert such a society has failed has been in historical instances where it has been disturbed by an outside force, such as Russia in the Balkans, the Catholic Church and USSR in Latin America, etc.
President Eden wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:50 am
I'm not sure I follow your last sentence here. What "therein undefined society" are we talking about? Societies arise from people with similar outlooks on life living together in a close geographic space over a period of time. People choose to live together, or not, based on certain commonalities or differences. Those commonalities with each other, and differences from other groups in a different geographic space, are enshrined formally in the development of things like religious practices, cultural traditions, and eventually, as the concept of a state arises, law. If nations didn't follow such a pattern then you would have a point, I think, but they do, which means at no point in the formal determination of governmental philosophy is there some abstract "undefined society" -- societies emerge which need a state to handle certain issues, which means the determination of how that state is run only happens in the context of a society that already exists.
Maybe I should ask for an example. What state, whether lost to history or existing today, comes to you as an example of a state which does not follow this pattern?
Society evolves and redefines itself on a constant basis, is the point I was making. The original foundation of the first society is entirely irrelevant because that society either doesn't exist or is entirely unrecognizable because it has been repeatedly redefined. And these societies are defined by the sum of their whole. Culture and religion, similarly, evolve and adopt over the millennia. Trinitarian Christianity would have been thrown out by most of the original societies as bizarre and confusing. It was thrown out by Rome for centuries until their society redefined itself. Coincidentally, they too failed because they constantly tried to enforce dominant religions and ethnicities.

Authoritarianism is the key unifying problem, and liberalism is the solution.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#68 Post by Undiplomatic Solutionarian » Thu Jan 11, 2018 10:33 pm

I would not go so far as to say that modern liberalism in America is text book Marxism, and I would not go so far as to say that text book Marxism is in itself evil.

The modern American liberal agenda is a moral socialism. It is socialism which stands upon constitional axioms. It is the inevitable progression of our republic in the modern era.

The socialist agenda of modern American liberalism is just getting started. Welcome to the future.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#69 Post by Jeff Kuta » Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:11 am

"Society evolves and redefines itself on a constant basis, is the point I was making."

And it can only do so with an influx of new viewpoints and ideas, hardly something that "societies with one dominant ethnicity and faith" exhibit.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#70 Post by leon1122 » Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:55 am

Really? Are you saying that Europe didn't evolve and redefine itself as it transitioned from the feudal system to the Renaissance and to the Enlightenment?

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Re: I am a stable genius

#71 Post by CroakandDagger » Fri Jan 12, 2018 2:59 am

Of course it didn't. Nothing new and innovative ever came from white christians.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#72 Post by TrPrado » Fri Jan 12, 2018 5:22 am

The Renaissance doesn’t contradict his statement. It was a result of the reintroduction of old ideas, so separated from European life that they were essentially new ideas, from the Greeks, preserved by Muslim society.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#73 Post by Jeff Kuta » Fri Jan 12, 2018 7:17 am

That’s kind of why it’s called the Renaissance.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#74 Post by Jeff Kuta » Fri Jan 12, 2018 7:20 am

And Croak, way to play the racial and religious victim cards for the majority. Must be a tough life.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#75 Post by President Eden » Fri Jan 12, 2018 8:19 am

There's a lot for me to catch up on. Prado, I am going to get back to our exchange soon, sorry for making you wait.

This idea that a society with one dominant ethnicity and faith somehow can't have an influx of new ideas and viewpoints is pretty silly though, and quick to address, so I'll do that now.
You can still trade and accept some immigration in a society with one dominant identity. The United States of pre-1965 is a strong recent example of this. Up until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the United States was over 80% white, most of it from a few Northern European ethnicities (English, German, and Irish, mainly), and almost completely Christian (significantly Protestant). Due to the Cold War and the consequent spread of capitalism across the globe, the United States was the leading technological innovator in the world.
Hell, your own example of the Renaissance is a good one here, too. The Renaissance took off due to trade between Italian city-states and the Arab World, and the sheltering and resettling of Byzantine refugees after the fall of the Empire. These places weren't cosmopolitan secular havens, though; they were still ethnically distinct city-states (Venetians, Genoese, Sicilians, Florentines, and so forth), and each state was nearly 100% Catholic. The Italian cities didn't have to compromise their identity to reap the benefits of the Renaissance, and in fact, the Renaissance added an entirely new dimension that strengthened their self-identification: they claimed to be "heirs of Rome" in a sense, having first the land and now the ideas of the progenitor of European civilization.
And while you could argue that the various European states were fairly similar to each other culturally (relative to the divergence between them and the rest of the world), they were still very distinctly different societies that came up with and shared different ideas, one way or another. (Unfortunately for the inhabitants of early modern Europe, "sharing" these ideas would often come at the end of a blade. Liberalism deserves a lot of credit for the modern market economy, which has done a lot of work toward creating nonviolent means of sharing ideas.)

It's certainly true that states with weaker national identities are more likely to be open to newer ideas, and perhaps could be said to be more "innovative" depending on how we define the term. When you don't have a singular national ethos restraining your decision-making, you have more freedom to explore new ideas.
The reverse side of this is that some ideas are not only bad but plainly disastrous for the future of a people, and if you erode your national ethos in the name of individualism, you make it that much harder to cast off bad ideas, as you do not have a clear national identity to assert proactively against those bad ideas.
This brings me back to my original criticism of liberalism a couple of pages back. It is becoming quite clear, from the unabated march of the Marxist left in Western liberal states toward socialism, that liberalism is missing something in the ideological battle against Marxism. It does not have an affirmative identity to assert against the Marxists. Liberalism atomizes people down into the individual, which leaves it primed for the divide-and-conquer strategy that Marxists employ to pave the way for revolution. It has plenty of rational arguments, but no grand unifying vision of a liberal society -- and what we are learning above all, as our traditional barometers of the health of our republican society show us it is in danger of death (very low political participation rate, very low approval ratings for incumbents but no effort to unseat them, a complete lack of trust in the political establishment which cannot be converted into action due to its own inertia), is that rational argument is not enough. It works only with rational people, and there are very few (none?) of those.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#76 Post by ziran » Fri Jan 12, 2018 2:53 pm

i think most europeans during the renaissance didn't view them selves as all belonging to one monolithic european christian group. there was a shit-ton of religious and nationalist conflict, all the time. peace was an aberration. it is only within the past ~500 years that people began to see themselves as "white". before, they were catholic, protestant, orthodox, jewish or muslim and/or they were irish, basque, czech etc.

i agree that what president eden calls liberalism was the primary force that led to the destruction of these identities (i have at various points in my life called this force: capitalism, the state, civilisation, the planetary work-machine etc. what to call the thing that we all hate is often the most contentious topic for some reason). but i disagree that there is a way back to that (they imply this but don't state it outright).

does this mean we have to remain atomised individuals? no. what do we become instead? i don't know, but simply being "black" or "white" or whatever else is presented to us by this force, does not appeal to me.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#77 Post by Jeff Kuta » Fri Jan 12, 2018 3:57 pm

Harlem Renaissance

Surely a result of a monolithic culture in the United States, pre-1960s.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#78 Post by President Eden » Fri Jan 12, 2018 5:11 pm

Jeff Kuta wrote:
Fri Jan 12, 2018 3:57 pm
Harlem Renaissance

Surely a result of a monolithic culture in the United States, pre-1960s.
Nice goalpost shift.

You said:
And it can only do so with an influx of new viewpoints and ideas, hardly something that "societies with one dominant ethnicity and faith" exhibit.
Emphasis mine.

I gave you multiple examples of societies which evolved through the influx of new viewpoints and ideas which retained their dominant ethnicity and faith in the process.
You posting an example of a cultural trend that had some lasting impact on a dominant ethnicity that originated outside of that ethnicity doesn't prove your argument that this is the only way this can happen.
You made your burden not proving that it can happen this way (which I didn't dispute and which no reasonable person would) but proving it can only happen this way. Posting one example doesn't do that and is basically irrelevant toward meeting that goal.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#79 Post by President Eden » Fri Jan 12, 2018 5:18 pm

ziran wrote:
Fri Jan 12, 2018 2:53 pm
i think most europeans during the renaissance didn't view them selves as all belonging to one monolithic european christian group. there was a shit-ton of religious and nationalist conflict, all the time. peace was an aberration. it is only within the past ~500 years that people began to see themselves as "white". before, they were catholic, protestant, orthodox, jewish or muslim and/or they were irish, basque, czech etc.

i agree that what president eden calls liberalism was the primary force that led to the destruction of these identities (i have at various points in my life called this force: capitalism, the state, civilisation, the planetary work-machine etc. what to call the thing that we all hate is often the most contentious topic for some reason). but i disagree that there is a way back to that (they imply this but don't state it outright).

does this mean we have to remain atomised individuals? no. what do we become instead? i don't know, but simply being "black" or "white" or whatever else is presented to us by this force, does not appeal to me.
I'm not saying they did view themselves as some pan-European family. They clearly didn't, no argument here.
What I am saying is that they did view themselves very clearly as whatever ethnicity and faith they held. They were inarguably Irish, Basque, Czech, and so forth (in the Renaissance example inarguably Venetian, Genoese, Florentine). I would say they were all one faith in the time of the Italian Renaissance, simply because that much is true (prior to Luther they were all Catholic, and most Italian states never felt a significant impact from the Reformation and remained Catholic), but my point isn't that all Europeans were the same. My point is that they had in common a strong national and religious identity, and when things did change that caused them to reevaluate that identity (for example, the Reformation's effect on Northern European states), they ultimately retained some strong, nation-defining identity in the end, even if it changed.

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Re: I am a stable genius

#80 Post by Jamiet99uk » Fri Jan 12, 2018 7:54 pm

Trump's latest lie:

"Reason I canceled [sic] my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for “peanuts,” only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!"

The truth:

The deal to sell the London embassy and relocate it was approved during the administration of George W. Bush.

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