Sunday, August 15, 2021

Alberta's likely fate as the teachers association leaders decide it must combat Jason Kenney's culture war strategy by moving far left in this culture war in order o keep balance and raise 'moral kids'.  The Orange bubble reasoning is that anything else is "hate".


Good people get led astray into landscape traps that suit their moral-political and quasi-religious biases. That's why Jonathan Haidt's old paper on the fallacy of rational based decision making was so seminal.




Sunday, August 8, 2021

Woke Authoritarianism eventually runs into Wokish Equity

 


Does Pan-nationalism Foster Sub-nationalism?

Smith makes one final, excellent, and fairly novel point in his 2nd edition of "Nationalism".  Growing trends towards pan-nationalism may be engendering ethnie based energies, such as Quebec separatism, Basque & Catalon independence, and perhaps even Red Blue divides in the States.


Since I tend to favour homestatic views of human psychology (i.e. we feel most comfortable with a certain base level of 'stimulation' on a variety of proximate needs), this idea makes sense to me.  If we have a 'nationalism' meter which is calibrated, gene-culturally, based on a number of large-group tendencies, then perhaps shifting to a larger group orientation encourages us to thing smaller-group on some other orientations?


Phrased differently, our tendency for a certain level of 'nation state-ism" can either be made up of a current nation state orientation or a more pan-national one complimented by a more 'tribal' (ethnie) one.  For instance as Canada becomes more multi-cultural and pan-national, its people identify more and more with their heritages and less and less with a mythic Canadian identity.  As Trudeau and other hyper-globalists say, Canada (and UK, etc.) have no distinct cultural identity.  We are amalgams of different identities who are unified by progressive multi-cultural foci.


IMPLICATIONS


There are obviously some HUGE social and political implications here.  As nation states become passe, we should see a lot more ethnic and pseudo-ethnic focus.  Thus you get a resurgence of Black American myths, but you also get rich white liberals imagining themselves as an ally group which is clearly distinct from their non-allying peers.


This is really interesting.


We get classic tribalism re-emerging, but we also get the development of new theory or quasi-religion based groups.  This explains why things like vaccine mandates now become a very clear demarcation point for a whole host of other culturally identifying positions.  Groups are in a hyper-demarcation process.  Thus you get the tattoo groups and the anti-tattoo groups.  No one is planning any of this, it just feels right to have a new level of "uniqueness" and group affiliation to your identity.  Nation based assimilation is now super passe.  The lack of enthusiasm with the Olympics exemplifies this.  Many people don't want woke members of their nation to win, others don't want conservative members of their nation to win (or even play).


I suspect the nation state is over and done with.  But, I think it is very unlikely that pan-nationalism / globablism will be able to fill the void.  Sure you'll have super-zealous progressive globablist making costly commitment display "for humanity".  Progressive wokeism, may even be able to congeal enough of a cultural identity to make this feasible. But if it does this, it will have to do it at the level of religion and not secular governance.  Climate change, save the whales, and every other common pool problem are good-enough as costly commitment display markers, but sacrifice for these tropes doesn't have the adaptive group conditions necessary to make things work at a more practical (and secular) level.

Saturday, August 7, 2021

Not Unique

 The authoritarian dynamics of the Soviet Union and Maoist China were not unique. They're a secular-progressive version of the famous Catholic Inquisitional periods. 


The main idea is that situations are so severe drastic norm compliance rules are justified.  Well, not just justified - required for proper life functions.


I suspect we would have seen similar behaviours emerge during pre-axial ages as populations tried to appease various gods "to make things right". 

    "Hey Zoraster, you better leave that offering when you walk by the temple, because if not, we'll have to report you.  We're all in this together.  14 days to appease the gods.  It's just a small little thing."


I suspect most of the Covid rules are more akin to token appeasing shamanism that good science. But, then again, how you look at such question is entirely dependent upon whether you're analyzing things at a population level or individual level.  On an individual level, almost no Covid rules make sense.  On a population level, most anything that creates a sense of importance makes sense (regardless of its non-social factuality).


Australian Officials Issue Soviet-Style COVID Broadcasts: Begin Turning in Your Neighbors Now

https://www.westernjournal.com/australian-officials-issue-soviet-style-covid-broadcasts-begin-turning-neighbors-now/?utm_source=parler&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_campaign=parler

Monday, August 2, 2021

Public "Health" Lock Downs

 How long until gun violence results in public health lockdowns?  Not long is my guess...


https://www.foxnews.com/us/washington-dc-murders-surpass-coronavirus-deaths-july