• PolitiScales
    233 replies, posted
I don't even remotely agree. I've never felt like my country was my extended family. Nor that I shared an identity with other Canadians beyond being "human". I sure as fuck don't relate to a lot of Canadians who feel considerably different about a great number of issues than I do, as you can see in many countries with unified cultures "Social conflicts and social norms" don't alleviate shit, they actually are part of the problem for a lot of people, nor do I understand how this applies to having a "framework to have children in". When a country is spread out as wide and as disparate as the US or Canada is, i genuinely don't know how you can have these feelings without disregarding reality.
Rate my peen https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/165/40f50535-7949-448e-8b77-e637ea4457e4/image.png
It's the closest thing you've got to it though, considering modern nations are based on a shared heritage which in turn is tied to genetic similarity or distance, and that itself reflects on degree of kinship. This makes sense considering you historically have social development fostering a hierarchy of family, clan, tribe, ethnos, and so on that culminated in the modern nation, which was the basis for liberalism (because the existence natural rights that precede the state depend on agreement between its citizens to respect them, which is more readily done when those people are alike). These social units have always been tied to managing matters of property ownership, commonly owned land, and raising of children. A likely reason cultures consistently have a belief in god or gods is that they are placed as the unifying top of this hierarchy and serve as the source of values that perpetuate it. The whole thing is evolutionarily advantageous, so there's really no choice but to recognize its value and continued existence. On the flip side, we can see in history states spanning across great divisions related to all this are either unstable, authoritarian, or both. We also can see that places with either quite a bit of freedom or an extensive welfare state are based first on a shared identity and set of cultural norms that help mitigate social antagonisms. In other words, the basis of cooperation, whether it be the respect of your rights or paying for the disabled and elderly, is based something shared. You see this in the writings of people like Hamilton and John Jay, and it's supported by studies of what makes multiethnic states like Switzerland work. Even your friends are more similar to you than strangers, and churches tend to be homogeneous and revolving around ethnic groups. There's really no reason to pretend shared values and identity is meaningless. It's a huge part of social capital and trust in institutions. Ignoring it is ignoring a huge element of what helps democracy work. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. People are going to default to identity for two big reasons. One is the law of entropy, the breakdown into more specialized and niche parts which we consistently see in genetics and linguistics (this is the reason Africa is the most diverse continent). The other is that as our society becomes more complex, fast-paced, and atomized, shared identity will become more important in holding it together. It also ensures a positive sum outcome, that people aren't left behind (the family was the first safety net and the church the first charity organization, after all) and someone else's gains are also your gains. The future division of labor is going to be highly technical, and so our class system will be more stratified. If you emphasize family, community, and shared identity, you create a better social safety net that goes beyond just government programs that also benefit from this. It more readily means that capitalism really is a rising tide that lifts all, not something that squeezes the middle and exploits the lower, and that we have faith in our representatives. On the contrary, the reason why large countries like these work is a shared identity, especially a civic one as they are likely to have more regional, ethnic, etc. divisions. Its decline is why the US is struggling internally. Our civic identity is the outgrowth of a middle class, which is enfranchised (has stake in society and is self-governing) because it is based small property ownership, therefore family, and therefore local community. This is suffering right now. This is why libertarian socialism is just a meme, on that note.
You should have pride mainly for things you've achieved yourself, like working hard and getting successful results, loving a person that gives you meaning and love, raising your child to be a smart and successful person. Goals met, decisions made, achievements reached, skills acquired, surrounding yourself with people who make you feel an outstanding, loved person Pride in your nation's value is something understandable and that I can get behind. Italy is chock-full of literature, sculptures, buildings, paintings, music, history (also food) and I absolutely adore it; even though I had nothing to do with it, I am proud to have this heritage However that doesn't make me feel Italian, especially since I am so far from your average compare. I don't care about soccer, I don't really care about the food, or today's culture. We're a bunch of uncivil racists, quasi-mobsters, intolerant, blind. Our politics have been shit since we've become a nation Pride shouldn't make you blind to your country's faults, it should drive you to fix them. Pride should not be your convenient excuse to forgive every mistake or ill action because you fear change. Nothing is perfect, much less a State. RNG decided you were born here, somebody was born over there et cetera. How can you take pride in this? It's quite literally meaningless, it's like being proud that your house is blue
I don't understand why you can't take pride in where you come from and what was passed down to you while also being critical of it and taking pride in your own achievements.
Because pride is for earned achievements IMO. Pride for anything else is just hubris.
Alright. You seem to fear pride in something greater making up divisions and hurting people, basically. I'd call that chauvinism. I see national or any other form of community pride as stewardship for the things that make our democracy and society work, pride in the things that make people cooperative and altruistic. So how about we just ditch the use of 'pride' and say there's a difference between stewardship and chauvinism?
Of course there's a difference in those two concepts but I don't think you CAN separate them by just saying "lets only talk about one". Stewardship, a desire to preserve the environment, the community, and area in which you live is healthy, reasonable and gives back to the community. But nationalism isn't just that, it's way, way more than that and as has been conveyed by every defender of nationalism in this thread thus far, pride is an essential element of it. Like I said, I'm thankful to be a Canadian, and I very highly rank the values of stewardship and environmentalism because of that thankfulness for where I was born, but I take no pride in it. I don't think I'm a better person for where I came from, or that what I was born into makes me better. The opportunities I've been given give me great pause for thought and thankfulness, but outside of things I did for myself I don't feel pride in things because as far as I can see, Pride is a negative emotion.
Where did you understand "you can be proud of your heritage" as "you can't take pride in what was passed down to you?" I extend an olive branch and you knock it out of my hand? Unless "where you come from" implies the journey your life takes you on, the hardships you faced and conquered, the many times you fall and get back up, there's no real reason I was born in what can be considered a village in one of the poorest places of Italy, where backwards mentality is almost a requirement for acceptance else you're branded as an outcast. racism and sexist is prevalent and the land and resources are getting exploited to hell by what mafia is present in the general region. What's there to be proud of?
I don't know, I don't see pride in yourself and what's around you as strictly separable, really. You are a social animal, little you achieve is done on your own (or solely to your benefit) and without an infrastructure that is socially created and maintained. The pride in either yourself or what's around you is based on the same principle and they're mutually dependent. The labor you do to the benefit or upkeep of yourself is just manipulating an environment that many people in the past created by carving order out of a naturally chaotic world, but you're also indirectly maintaining it so others can do the same. Social systems work because they reconcile self-interest and group interest, and this is arguably best done through the family since it fosters cross-generational thinking. Especially in men, who seem to need that enfranchisement more than women. You could, if you wanted, waste away and do nothing. That's the natural state without investment, without that TLC. But you aspire to greater and you work in spite of every inconvenience and difficulty, and nature has an infinite amount of them. In the process you not only benefit yourself, you make a better world for your children and therefore others. Pride is likely what motivates a person, because if they didn't use it they would be beaten by someone else who did, and that person would make more money, find better status, find a better partner. It's no different for social systems, whether they be families, neighborhoods, religions, nations, or whatever. They all would decay and become displaced by nature or competitors without constant collective investment and long-term thinking, and pride is the lubricant for that (I'd say it's actually more important because there is no tragedy of the commons when it comes to the individual, obviously). Work needs to be done and if you don't take pride in putting in the energy to stave off the entropy and pass down the torch, who will? These forms of pride are all about the same thing here, which is posterity. Your narrow one is tied to the future of something bigger like the family, and so on. Similarly, what you inherit from the past and do with it is passed on to the future. If you want to understand the drives of nationalism, it's just the thinking that arises when people have families, own property, and otherwise have a social stake. There's nothing really wrong with it.
I think I'm the only one in the thread with a progressivism 8values https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1822/ffb7f3ad-f433-493f-80ba-4a849f290be3/image.png
Assuming for a second you're correct, why would the nation as a group self-identity be the cut-off point for this purpose? Why not go further (the human) or backwards (the city; the neighborhood; the specific group of individual people I interact with of my own volition) - while at the same time identifying with more concrete interest groups (workers of an industry; a category of people marginalized by current society)? Do these not serve equal purpose in the creation of a group identity from which one is to have mutual solidarity and respect for rights, only that the former (identifying as a human first) allows to stand on a basis for greater inclusiveness in a civic society and the creation of ties, while the latter (cities, neighborhood, small personal groups) allow for greater inclusion of individuals themselves in a slightly more personal context that can comprehend them and consider their wants and needs as opposed to the wants and needs of some vague "people", some "greater national good". I would still personally prefer the latter to the former because the category of "human" has been proven to be equally malleable in certain political circles. Broad yet vague categories like the nation ensure nothing as long as the inclusion or exclusion into such a group will be done arbitrarily by people deciding for others whether they are fit to be a national of a certain state or not, which I'm sure you would agree is not a thing that might change anytime soon as all people seem to do historically is to expand and contract this category which serves as a basis for inclusiveness in civic life as they see fit. Would a broader and obviously less vague category, like human, or more concrete category, like neighbor or resident of the same town, not achieve greater results in terms of stability while also better counteracting things like exclusion from a society (on some level) in which one very clearly exists and is constrained by it? I would personally easily pick community (a thing one more personally interacts with) any day of the week over something so vague and distant as a nation (a thing one passively belongs to and which is merely given or assigned to a person) as a basis for organization of either my life or the lives of others. An order in which one belongs by virtue of birth and not by virtue of constant interaction is no basis for pride of any sort, for the individual's actions have no bearing on his being assigned as a cell of this great national body - one can be proud of one's actions of maintenance of such a social system as you have said in later posts, but there is no such grounding for merely being a national, merely a citizen. (not that there's anything wrong with feeling baseless pride - feel whatever you like, it sure feels better than not doing so).
People do take pride in those groups though. You ever meet a person from Boston or Philadelphia, they fucking love to tell you about how they're from there and how proud they are. People from the Bronx will talk about being proud of it. People will take pride in being part of some family or whatever, despite being generations removed. And these things stack. People going "I'm proud to be a McClenney and I'm proud to be from Boston and I'm proud to be an American!" they're not mutually exclusive. Being proud to be human honestly doesn't necessarily work because that applies to literally everyone anyone is going to communicate with. If the Vulcans or the Turians or whatever sci-fi species comes down tomorrow and start talking with us, then "Proud to be human" actually means something because its not a universal constant at that point.
Yes, but I speak of more than just pride - I speak of using these categories as your basis for solidarity and the basis, as conscript/tempcon here seems to claim, for the perpetuation of inalienable human rights. It just seems odd to me to restrict that functionality to the category of the nation as optimal above other group identities I have demonstrated. There is nothing wrong with pride per se, as I have stated earlier, but it does seem to be true that unless you actively contribute by constant active interaction (more than merely paying taxes and not breaking the law) that this feeling of pride is merely an emotion not based on any concrete logic, as HumanAbyss claimed earlier. What is strange to me however is his suggestion that only emotions backed in logic are valid (unless I somehow misunderstood him).
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/600/bf86d8cf-5b07-40a7-b8c1-97960341967e/stažený soubor.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/236959/af462fd4-06fb-4af2-bfa8-d47b9ea95f1b/image.png Yeah that's pretty accurate, I'd say
Mine sounds like a slogan for a neo nazi group And im not even nationalistic to any reasonable sense PolitiScales
PolitiScales https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1430/2b4c9af0-9869-4232-be8a-13abf474cb0c/download.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434263159486939149/469511171066691586/acdb4076-b570-4482-ad00-e8d541637fea.png Not too far off base, it seems. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434263159486939149/469513049477480451/cd6035c7-ef59-4133-ac07-afcceafbe059.png Not so sure about this one though, mostly on the economic axis. I feel I'm half-and-half on those points, not tilted 2/3rds in favor of socialism. There's good points and bad points in both systems to an equal degree.
l don't think all group identities are created equal. Some are more socially useful than others, some capture more similarities in variation than others. This map shows nationality is very culturally significant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world It has also been found that basic cultural values overwhelmingly apply on national lines, with cross-border intermixtures being relatively rare. This is true even between countries with shared cultural histories. Additionally, even cultural clusters of countries do not intermix much across borders. This suggests nations are culturally meaningful units[9]. People self-sort and group up accordingly on this 'spectrum'. Smaller groups seem more significant on average, and nationality appears like the balance that is struck between what people naturally associate with and what political or economic development permits and competition incentivizes, which are large and encompassing institutions. In history, those seem to tie people together and have them associate on a new, national basis. Is it less of a strong bond than what you have on a provincial level? I'm sure. But the next one over speaks your language, is ethnically very similar to you, and practices the same religion. If you work together, you can preserve your independence rather than being conquered individually. Why this expansion of the common space and identity doesn't progress past the national level, I'm not sure. Diminishing return I guess. It's probably because that rule falls apart beyond a certain point on this continuum, and inclusion becomes impossible without compromising social capital and provoking conflict. It seems like a kind of balance that probably has something to do with the grim realities of geopolitics and competing interests, which is never done away with because the groups are rooted in things like the mentioned religion, language, and ethnicity. Those things only become more internally divergent and and with greater differences to bond around. Sure, you could be a regionalist like me. It's much more adaptable and amenable to smaller, internal variations that develop overtime and create some kind of group self-conception. Unfortunately, I just see no way to integrate internationalism and cosmopolitanism into this. These things don't exist outside of the material systems we create, they have no basis in our social ones which only get more diverse, particularist, and niche over time. That's why I keep referencing the history of religion, ethnicity, and language. They branch off more than they unite. I mean, the internet is my favorite example since it's the most free and pluralistic environment for people. It's only gotten more segregated and echo chamber-y over time, especially with the rise of social media and prominent platforms like reddit, 4chan, etc. The latter's integration and centralization has paradoxically only created more divergence. Freedom of choice in a unified environment creates less homogeneity not more of it. Localism/regionalism makes more sense to me than universalism here, because given free choice people become more different, not more similar. This fits in with an idea of the law of entropy. Democracy and rights depend on social agreement and peace, they depend on social capital which does not work like the economic kind since it's less of a simple positive sum outcome. Someone else's gains aren't always mine in the former, and the market benefits from as much dynamism as possible whereas communities don't necessarily. So there's a contradiction, people are the problem in the market in the sense that they tend to create artificial divisions in its purely material arrangement (which I think is an origin of the liberal-conservative divided). I think this is because the economy can just grow eternally, but it's different when it comes to matters of land, family/reproduction, and social trust. They don't necessarily improve with scale and time, they are much less inclusive in nature. They aren't grown so much as balanced. And, a lot of political problems can be traced to the imbalance and that contradiction. I think that's why liberals and conservatives are at each other's throats.
Wouldn't a constant secessionism then be the inevitable end goal of such entropy and inevitable mutation of cultural memes in groups on a level smaller and more comprehensible than a nation - unless one speaks of city states? It would seem to make more sense then to support new, smaller categories of self-determination that are more fitted to new realities than to religiously preserve old ones like a constant national identity, no? After all, I can personally attest that despite sharing the language (if one can even call it that, after all, the meanings people use for the same words vary) and some similar circumstacial memes as nationwide fellow citizens, I have never felt much of a connection to many of them, sharing neither ideas nor religion nor values nor affinities nor political goals. Where then does a person like me go; Why would a person such as myself have any incentive in supporting the category of a nation that alienates me, as opposed to encouraging new ones more befitting my personally experienced reality? What good is an arbitrary peace that leaves people marginalized, when a new peace can be achieved by changing the status quo? It is for this reason that I would agree with what you now seem to say, that localism is a much better system for solidarity and organizing group interest than something as vague as a nation because it has more potential to be something actually empowering to the individual (which would also be more adaptable) than some lowest common denominator consensus in which everyone must accept being equally disappointed. So as said earlier, such a group identity has much more of a basis for pride (as one would have to actually interact with the individuals in the group and with other group representatives) than nationalism, while also being both more relevant in its scope and potentially freeing for the individual involved.
obligatory post no one will pay attention to How does Politiscales decide the flag layout, anyway? Besides the symbols, of course. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/210867/d7c58eb5-11fc-48c9-8009-696d8e98d253/regulation hooooo.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/210867/ed8544ea-d526-4b37-8f43-7643c72b3cc2/progress hooooo.png
Yeah alot of the wording on these questions was loaded as hell that's why alot of it is neutral as fuck. (Also I'm just not super politically involved. Boil me down to: I like the idea of Star Trek's Federation and support many tennets of it but I realize there's alot of nuance and some things aren't completely realistic without caveats). https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/110848/617f3fda-6fae-4b39-afb0-69c41c9566d6/download.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/110848/aeeb5324-0754-48f6-a904-b21467d79e5a/download (1).png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/114090/562bfb8f-5f56-4504-b4f6-da1e1fe32b7b/index1.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/114090/ec093e27-d044-42d0-b8f6-33714b27d200/index.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/210225/75a19bce-b6ce-4f56-9ee1-4c531a3a9e6f/download.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/210225/d0577a8e-35cb-4b42-979c-532c04dc2d88/download (1).png Welp, here's mine. There were a few questions I didn't quite understand though.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/190794/3bc0d8ca-116b-4bc7-a83c-0ce533a78ab5/image.png I love that little hint of a hammer missing its sickle on that flag lmao https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/190794/20e9e48d-e855-4c6a-8a2f-0844e695a8a0/image.png i took these hours apart and purposefully went for initial gut instinct to avoid gaming it like people tend to do with quizzes, I would never call myself a libertarian but the rest of it seems pretty spot on
https://s26.postimg.cc/twr613xdl/canvas.png https://s26.postimg.cc/781z1j8a1/canvas2.png One more to add to the Pinko horde.
https://i.imgur.com/9HpKLDw.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1977/a4a57868-d985-40b7-bad7-0c0b70b31237/image.png But this is from about 2-3 months ago https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1977/c05191b1-8d06-446f-960e-e16c9e2cb017/image.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109796/78a01dfc-44e6-4ce9-b9b7-a0d1e890d6ca/politiscales 2018.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109796/f7949ad9-2a17-4cc7-9576-af9cd94e648b/8values 2018.2.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/224368/13e0e49e-80dc-4cd5-9ca6-d5e5bfff4266/politic.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/224368/dedd42d1-f87c-4aa0-9dc2-60014202f6c7/8values.png Sweet Jesus some of those PolitiScales quest are fucking strange
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.