Other European countries like Switzerland, also banned full face veils(burqas) in public. Try entering a bank, city hall, school, etc with a balaclava, ski mask or motorcycle helmet see how that goes.
Allowing the surveillance of minors if they show signs of radicalization? This to me makes sense under existing child protection laws. If kids are being raised in environments that are harmful to themselves and society, should we just sit by and let them get permanently wrecked till they reach adulthood, over a technicality? The earlier you can catch the issues the better for everyone and the higher the chance you can rescue the child. Existing child protection laws in Germany already allow the state a lot of power to take children away from parents if they're seen as unfit.
Controlling how people dress sounds pretty authoritarian to me. The fact that it's currently not acceptable to enter a bank with a covered face would indicate a law banning it in all public locations is not needed.
Taking rights away from people labelled as terrorists is a pretty standard way for governments to control viewpoints. It gives them the power to add any group they don't like to a list, and deport/imprison them with minimal judicial process.
I don't know enough about surveillance of minors to comment on that one.
To play devil's advocate, isn't it illegal wear a swastika in Germany? How is wearing a burqa, a symbol of female oppression any different?
Freedom of religion only goes so far, because the culture of the host country takes precedence. To take it to the extreme, if there were a religion where part of standard practice involved assaulting women and children, we would obviously limit those practices.
The ban on swastikas in Germany is an authoritarian law, it's just one which is popular enough there that there isn't enough support to repeal it despite it being an unambiguous constraint on speech.
Non-consensual violence is prohibited because it directly harms other people. Face coverings don't directly harm anyone and laws that exist only for the government's convenience are authoritarian laws. There are ways to investigate bank robberies even if the robbers are wearing masks and in fact a law against masks is fairly ridiculous because anyone willing to break the law against robbing banks would be willing to break a law against wearing a face covering, so such laws only afflict innocent people.
>The ban on swastikas in Germany is an authoritarian law,
With this type of logic, all laws authoritarian then, like speeding laws, theft laws, and anything else that prevents you from doing what you want to do becomes authoritarian.
“Expression” is a bit of an overloaded word here. Carrying a swastika is considered similar to hate speech. Just like you cannot just make death threats in the U.S., even though you are just “expressing” yourself as long as you do not carry out the threat. Not saying those are exactly the same, but there are limits to expression, and spreading hate against large swathes of people is considered like that in Europe. Especially because that kind of speech can at some point turn into actual physical violence against the groups in question.
Threats aren't illegal because of their information content, they're effectively evidence of intent to commit violence. It's like confessing to a crime. You're being punished for the crime, not for the admission, but you admitting to it sure makes it easier to prove.
You and the parent both made good points. In Germany a swastika might be seen as more of a direct threat of specific action than other places. That makes it more sensible to classify as a threat.
That's the argument authoritarians use when they want to censor something. The problem with it is that it proves too much. Do we also get to apply it to symbols of communism because of the millions of people who died under Mao, or the US flag because of slavery? What about that book Marx wrote that led to all the horrors under the USSR; can't displaying books also be symbolic?
You don't want the government to have the power to decide things like that. It's better that they censor nothing.
>Controlling how people dress sounds pretty authoritarian to me
You're making it sound like under these rules, the government can force you to wear GAP jeans instead of Levi Strauss, when in reality the government has always enforced laws on public attire in public to preserve decency and security.
Otherwise it would be tyrannical since I'm not allowed to go naked in public or wearing the loincloths and Tribal Penis Gourd of my ancestors near schools.
Similarly, burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that, or there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms, or so much more nefarious cases.
Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
You're throwing a bunch of straw man arguments out, which makes it a lot of work to actually respond to this whole post.
Rights are always on a spectrum with a large amount of grey area.
> burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that
This is silly. Everyone wears coats in the winter.
> there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms
Is this actually a concern? AFAICT this isn't happening, it's just something that could theoretically happen, which doesn't make it a reason to decrease people rights. That would be another standard tactic for pushing authoritarian laws.
> Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
This seems valid, but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people. It hasn't gone well historically.
>Is this actually a concern? AFAICT this isn't happening
How do you know it isn't happening if their faces and bodies are always covered? Did you undress all of them to check?
> it's just something that could theoretically happen
Welcome to the real world where a lot of laws are made to cover things that could happen precisely so that when they DO happen, there's a law ready to enforce. Why? Because if something CAN happen, it WILL definitely happen.
> but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people.
I'm not. You come to my house, you follow my rules, you come to our country you follow our values, simple. If you want to live in the west and benefit from the western system that brings you free education, healthcare, justice, financial opportunities, welfare, freedom of speech, then you must follow the western values that built that system you came here to enjoy. Otherwise if you want to live like in Afghanistan, then go live in Afghanistan, not in our country.
Otherwise if you allow one flavor of imported oppressive cultures out of suicidal empathy, just so you don't "force your values on other people", then why not allow domestic oppressive cultures too, like fascism, nazism, communism, antisemitism, sexism, homofobia, etc? Why open your doors and only tolerate the foreign imported ones?
>It hasn't gone well historically.
Then you need to go back to the schools you went to and ask for a refund, because historically it definitely has. The federal government forced their values over the confederacy via war in 1865 and the US of today is better off from it. Allied powers forced their values over the Axis in WW2 and the world was better off from it. So many historic examples why you're wrong.
> I'm not. You come to my house, you follow my rules, you come to our country you follow our values, simple
I wish it was this simple, so badly, but that strategy has been tried many times before and it always ends in violence. First off, who is "our"? Is it the majority? That leaves every minority group vulnerable. Is it the most powerful (it usually is)? That leave everyone screwed. It all seems great, until you end up as a target. This is why we base our systems of rights to more universal, and not based on our ethnicity.
For example, some of the historical opinions of my fairly recent ancestors: All Jewish people should be dead; ditto for Homo/Tran-sexual; also the Irish; black people aren't humans; the middle east should be owned by Western Europeans, and if not, designed to minimize the chances of them forming successful nations; same for Africa
Seeing this as bad assumes you think hurting other people is bad, which I do. If you don't agree, then there isn't much to discuss, you are entirely correct withing your framework
> Otherwise if you allow one flavor of imported oppressive culture so you don't ":force yurt values on other people" why not allow domestic oppressive cultures too, like fascism? Why only tolerate imported ones?
Where I'm from being a Nazi is completely legal. We tolerate both. There is still an ongoing discussion about where to draw the line, but the standards are always higher than wearing clothes that you don't like. Germany may not tolerate Nazi's for obvious historical reasons.
I would recommend "They Thought They Were Free" for a more of a look into this. It's an interesting book.
Edit: This is not true, almost all laws are passed to deal with a situation that is already occurring.
> Welcome to the real world where a lot of laws are made to cover things that could happen precisely so that when they do happen, there's a law ready to enforce.
>but that strategy has been tried many times before and it always ends in violence
Then don't import people of divergent/adversarial cultures who aren't willing to integrate into your country and are only there to extract the monetary benefits of your society without conforming to the laws, customs, social contracts, cultures and obligations that society requires.
If you only accept people who gladly accept your culture and values, there is no violence. History has proven this yet it seems like uncharted territory to some people. "you mean putting the fox in the hen house ends in violence?!"
>First off, who is "our"? Is it the majority?
It's the amalgamation of culture, history, collection of laws, constitution, 'Volk Geist' and the voice of the democratic majority of the citizens of the country where you choose to emigrate that compose the concept of "our country", which you need to accept when you choose move somewhere, or GTFO. You can't move to a different culture and expect them to accept your alien values that might go against theirs. Their values hold precedence over yours.
> That leaves every minority group vulnerable
No it doesn't, this is just an empty appeal to emotional manipulation.
In most western democracies, minorities and legal immigrants have the same human rights and equal access to healthcare, education, justice system, etc as everyone else so they're not "more vulnerable" just because they can't wear a burka in public. To receive those rights, it requires them to accept and conform to the laws and values of the society they chose to move to, like the law of not wearing burkas for example, or the law to tolerate LGBT people. Not wearing burkas in public is not making the wearer more vulnerable. On the contrary, foreigners wearing burkas in public makes the locals feel uncomfortable and vulnerable in their own country.
>For example, some of the historical opinions of my fairly recent ancestors: All Jewish people should be dead;
You see, since all your arguments are just empty appeals to emotional manipulation or moving the goalposts from laws banning burkas to somehow being similar to genocide of jews, I will stop the conversation here since you're clearly arguing in bad faith. I've already covered all your points with arguments, there's nothing more I can add. If you want to accept them fine, if not, also fine. Good day.
> Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
Because governments shouldn’t be allowed to just wash their hands of any responsibility to a citizen, just because they don’t like their views, regardless of how extreme and vile those views maybe.
We have judicial systems for a reason. If someone joins a terrorist organisation, you arrest them and allow the justice system to determine the consequences. Allow governments to strip citizenships is effectively a mechanism to allow governments to avoid due process and their own judicial systems. Those are never healthy behaviours in any democracy.
Societies should deal with their own citizens properly, not just strip them of citizenship and declare them someone else’s problem. I have no idea why anyone would believe making it effectively impossible to ever leave, except by dying, terrorist organisation would be a good idea. That must ensure all members of terrorist organisations literally have nothing else to live for. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to ensure that all terrorist go out with a bang.
>We have judicial systems for a reason. If someone joins a terrorist organisation, you arrest them and allow the justice system to determine the consequences. Allow governments to strip citizenships is effectively a mechanism to allow governments to avoid due process and their own judicial systems.
What are you on? Taking away someone's naturalized dual citizenship is done by the judicial system via due process according to the draft proposal, not on the spot by police or whatever nonsense you imagine it.
If only you would have skimmed the proposal paper before commenting instead of getting your knickers in a twist over stuff you made up in your head, you would have saved us all the wasted time.
>I have no idea why anyone would believe making it effectively impossible to ever leave
They can leave with their other citizenship, genius. This law applies only to dual citizens, since you aren't allowed to make citizens stateless, Einstein. It's even written in the proposal which of course you haven't read but have strong options against it.
> Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists, this is really dangerous. If the government can classify any organisation as terrorists, and then remove citizenship from any members of that organisation, that is horrifying.
So yes, I very, very, strongly disagree with this measure, for very good reasons. How could anyone with any common sense support it?
>Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists
If your current laws allow for such oppressive abuse on the population without due process, then these new laws won't make things any worse for the people and you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away form registered ISIS members is the biggest problem.
I disagree completely. Citizens are protected by laws, such as the First Amendment, that are not applied to non-citizens (see the Julian Assange mess for details). If the government can designate a group of people as terrorists, and remove their citizenships for being terrorists, then they can additionally apply yet more tribulations on those people while not straying out of the legal protections afforded to citizens.
You keep saying "ISIS" like it's some magic incantation that makes everything else OK. Try saying "any organisation the government disapproves of" instead, and see how that fits your mental model of what's acceptable. For example:
> you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away from any organisation that the government disapproves of is the biggest problem.
I think you'll agree that this would be a big f**ing problem.
> You keep saying "ISIS" like it's some magic incantation that makes everything else OK. Try saying "any organisation the government disapproves of" instead, and see how that fits your mental model of what's acceptable.
Which other organizations who didn't kill or committed acts of violence to people in order to be wrongly considered terrorists by the government in the same vein as ISIS was?
>I think you'll agree that this would be a big f*ing problem.
It isn't. In most western democracies, if not all, gaining dual citizenship via naturalization is a voluntary privilege, not a right, that can always be revoked for crimes such as being part of a terrorist group. It's part of the contract you sign when you apply for citizenship. As it should be. That's who the law is targeting.
Your primary citizenship gained via by birth or by descent cannot be taken away from you almost anywhere.
Precisely my point about terrorist organisations; Palestine Action did not kill anyone, yet the UK considers them to be the same category of organisation as ISIS.
If I read this right, you're thinking that only naturalised citizens would be affected by such a law; those with dual nationality that can be "sent back to where they came from". Which explains why you think this is a good idea.
That's not how citizenship works. If you allow for removing citizenship, then all citizens, regardless of "primary" nationality, can be made non-citizens. There's no second-class citizenship that can be revoked while still retaining a first-class citizenship that cannot.
> Your primary citizenship gained via by birth or by descent cannot be taken away from you almost anywhere.
I’m sorry but you’re badly misinformed here. There is no concept of “primary citizenship”, you’re either a citizen or you’re not. If your government has a right to strip your citizenship, then mechanism by which you acquired citizenship is relevant. The whole point of citizenship is to declare that everyone with citizenship has identical rights and protections from their government.
There has been one person in the UK who had her citizenship revoked for joining ISIS. She was a born in UK, and was a British citizen from birth by right of decency. She is now stateless, a citizen of no country. These are the actual laws you’re defending, the hypothetical laws that only apply to naturalised citizens don’t exist, and aren’t being proposed.
No, it is you who are misinformed. According to your Wikipedia link she was a dual citizen so the UK had the legal rights to strip her of her British one and she was left with her Bangladeshi citizenship, so not stateless.
>However, the UK government contended that Begum was a dual national, also holding citizenship of Bangladesh, and was not therefore made stateless by the decision.
>However, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission found that as a matter of the Bangladeshi nationality law, Begum also holds Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents, under section 5 of the Citizenship Act, 1951.
She was born in the UK as a UK citizens to parents that were naturalised UK citizens. By your definition her “primary” citizenship was British. That was where she was born, that was where she grew up, that was the first citizenship she gained.
Due to her parent Bangladeshi origins, she had a separate right to claim Bangladeshi citizenship, but at the point she lost her British citizenship had not claim that right. She has also never lived in Bangladesh, and has never held a Bangladeshi passport.
At the time UK was going to remove her citizenship, Bangladesh said the following:
> The Government of Bangladesh stated that Begum did not currently hold Bangladeshi citizenship and, without it, would not be allowed to enter Bangladesh.
You’ve made some pretty silly claims about countries not removing people’s “primary” citizenship. Begum is quite clearly a case where their “primary” citizenship based on the parameters you provided, was her British citizenship, and the UK has quite clearly stripped her of that citizenship. Bangladesh has also refused to acknowledge her as a citizen, which seems a lot fair that the UKs stance, given she’s never lived, worked, or paid taxes in Bangladesh, so it not clear why they should be responsible for her, rather than the country where she was born and raised.
>She was born in the UK as a UK citizens to parents that were naturalised UK citizens.
Her parents were not UK citizens, they were Bangladeshi citizens making her Bangladeshi first. Her parents had "settled" status in the UK granting her UK citizenship but her parents were not UK citizens. It's literally in the wiki link you shared.
"Begum was born in London to immigrant parents of Bangladeshi Muslim origin and citizenship"
> Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
Sounds great on paper, until it starts happening to X, which is your group, now suddenly a terrorist organization, and you happened to have joined in their view.
So then would you want to live next to an ISIS member just so you're not agreeing with "authoritarians"? What's with this form of suicidal empathy?
Calling the people you disagree with as "authoritarians", "-phobes", "racist", "nazis" and all kinds of slurs, without any arguments, doesn't work in your favor or help the conversation in any way, on the contrary.
Agreeing with common sense takes doesn't make one "authoritarians".
Learn to do critical thinking and augmenting, instead of heard mentality parroting oppressive slurs against people you disagree with, just because you convicted yourself (or propaganda has) that you're on the right side of history, and everyone else with contrary viewpoints is evil reincarnate that needs to be crushed or silenced.
Authoritarian is often used as a pejorative strawman rather than as any particularly coherent concern. For instance Italy's Meloni was framed by the media, and people who still believe it, as being the next Mussolini, if not Hitler. In reality? Her time as leader has been largely inconsequential and relatively popular, especially contrasted against the leadership in places like Germany and France.
In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.
Globalist views didn't lead to positive results? Until very recent no one was complaining: everything was going up and everyone got better. Now it goed a little less and the underbelly starts whining. And of course people do believe misinformation. People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade and now 'only' got inflafion correction whining its the globalist issue because some guy on tiktok explained it so well. Italy (or me personally for that matter) would be have been absolutely screwed without the EU and globalism, but keep listening to propaganda while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.
>Until very recent no one was complaining: everything was going up and everyone got better.
The stock market, and your housing and investment portfolios going up, didn't mean that everyone was happy, just the asset holders like yourself and those in your bubble but you're not majority of the working population.
You need to learn to differentiate between "the stock market" and "the economy". Working class people can easily be getting poorer while the stock market is going up. So of course they're mad.
>People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade
Huh? Who? Where? When? Maybe in your tech bubble but in the real world a lot of people's salaries haven't kept up with inflation, let alone consistency get raises ABOVE inflation. In France for example the average pension is now higher than the average salary.
>while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.
Top 10%er can't understand why those bottom 90% without assets who got screwed by globalism and saw their jobs offshored and salaries and savings obliterated by inflation caused by endless money printing are mad at the globalism that caused this massive wealth transfer from the working class to the upper asset owning classes.
You can't make this up. The sheer ignorance of reality of most people and the "fuck you I got mine" attitude is shattering. No wonder young people are flirting with communism.
Man, I am reading this whole thread in utter disbelief at all the naive "defenders of freedom", and I have to say that I fully agree with every single one of your comments.
The current systems in many places are breaking, but communism isn't a solution. Because the main reason the systems are breaking is not because of the systems themselves, but of the people in charge of them. Communism faces the exact same issue, except in that case the people in charge have orders of magnitude greater power and the people orders of magnitude less.
In a contemporary democracy we could, at least in theory, completely vote out literally every single pro-corporate, pro-war talking head in the next election. Now of course this won't ever happen, but at least in theory its an option. By contrast in communism, if one ends up unhappy with the system you have very little ability to change it.
Furthermore, in a capitalist system one can even start a communist sub-society. In fact there are many communes throughout the country, at least in the US. But in a communist system, you can't simply start a capitalist sub-society. The centralized nature of the system entails limits on freedoms, to ensure that every person is contributing to society as a whole. And this, in practice, trends towards dystopic authoritarianism in terms of how non-compliant individuals are treated.
The reason that people always claim that various efforts at communism weren't "real" communism is because the concept and theory of communism doesn't, and probably cannot, survive first contact with the interests and whims of humanity. By contrast I'd look at the overwhelming majority of the history of the US as an argument for capitalism. It's only relatively recent times, particularly after 1971 [1], that things have gone so terribly wrong.
> Because the main reason the systems are breaking is not because of the systems themselves, but of the people in charge of them
I disagree with this assessment. The reason systems are breaking are inherent contradictions in capitalism that inevitably lead to crisis. See Crisis Theory [0] for a more thorough description of the mechanisms at play.
Communism doesn't need to be authoritarian either - Salvador Allende famously tried for a more democratic socialism before the CIA couped him away - can't have the systemic competitor look good...
Then what would be your explanation for why the issues seem to be largely contemporary in nature, and in particular with 1971 being such a critical inflection point? That 1971 site is alluding to the end the Bretton Woods economic system. Prior to that date, 'money printing' by the government had extreme external constraints. After 1971, we became a completely free floating fiat economy.
This was a radical economic shift. And at first it yielded massive returns as one could expect with the ability to suddenly have infinite money in a world where, to date, money had been very "real." But over time, it turns out that pumping endless 'funny money' into an economy causes lots of bad things to happen, even when we can export much of the immediately apparent inflation.
Essentially the modern economic system we have only truly began in 1971. And it's separate from capitalism itself. The powers that be wanted the power to print unlimited money. And so they claimed that power. Prior to that year we lived in an entirely different world. For instance one interesting inflation index is a can of Campbell's tomato soup. From its introduction in 1897 to 1973 it cost about $0.10. Today it costs $1.24.
I do not believe the problems are contemporary in nature. We've had the Great Depression, the Long Depression of 1879 - 1899 etc etc.
Labor value and market value have been out of sync since the beginning of market capitalism. You might have a point about the end of Bretton-Woods making it worse, but it has been broken since the beginning.
I think there is a clear argument to be made that this is provably false. For instance the median income in 1960 for a worker was $5,435. [1] The GDP/capita at the time was $3002 [2]. So a median worker was getting very nearly 2x a share if the entire national GDP was equally distributed! And note that is for people with any income. That census did not collect data on 1960 for college educated full time workers, but based on trends from later years it was about 3x higher on average!
This is why the older generations were initially so aloof about the economic state of the US. They grew up in a time where they could go to college, graduate debt free, have a decent car, and even enough saved up for a down payment on their [first] house - all on income from a part time job.
You literally could not get a much more fair compensation for labor, because that's a huge chunk of the entire GDP being derived from median wages! Of course now we live in a time when the median wage is something like $50k and the GDP/capita is $90k. And many critical things, like housing, have increased in cost way beyond the rate of inflation, to the point that a median house is now something like 7 years of median labor which is just lol stupid driven by funny money that, again, mostly did not exist before 1971.
But getting back to 1960 - how would this, in any way, seem to suggest an out of sync labor value? If anything the flaw in my argument is that labor compensation was perhaps unsustainably high, because wages that high were only possible when you had a relatively large chunk of the population not working. On the other hand if we're going to create a society with a sustainable fertility rate and well raised children, then it's completely sustainable.
This is the context for Kennedy stating things like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Now a days even a pretty ardent nationalist would have to hold back a groan on hearing things like that, but it was a different world in the 60s.
The problem is that most Indo-European languages have grammatical gender, with English being a notable exception. In many cases, trying to fit that inclusive language means contorting or breaking the language grammar in unnatural ways, that's why many people oppose it.
Ring wing conservatives avidly throw our freedoms under the bus when convenient. Their electoral base is also very susceptible to thinkofyoungsebastian narratives.
Extreme collectivism affects both extreme, that is the concept that people are nothing but sacrificial lambs for the religion, the country, or the revolution.
Nice gaslighting attempt, but no. "We types" are concerned with everyone's civil liberties. But trying to divide us is just basic, text book abusive behavior.
> I'm not familiar with the far right in Germany. Why should we be assured that they will reverse course as soon as they can afford it?
In addition to the authoritarian aspect pointed out by a sibling comment, the far-right generally consider the ends to justify the means because of their sense of righteousness. They will compromise their values to get what they want (control over others). Just look at the hypocrisy of the free-speech absolutists on twitter who have no complaints over Lonnie shutting down Leftist accounts.
Because, similar to the US, they have authoritarian tendencies - strong nationalism and anti-immigration. How are you going to round up the bad people if you don't have surveillance everywhere?
Well the Axis powers from World War II are the most obvious demonstrations of nationalism begetting authoritarianism. Germany, Italy, and Japan were nationalist in the extreme. And Italy from that time is such a clear example that it's basically the canonical example used to teach how fascism emerges.
Contemporary examples include the Philippines, Hungary, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and arguably Russia, Turkey and India. Modi is a Hindu nationalist. The United States unfortunately is shaping up to count as an example as well.
Extreme forms of nationalism tend to have a narrative of grievance, a desire to restore a once a great national identity, and a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens, and enemies without and within, against whom authoritarians powers must be mobilized.
So there's a conceptual basis, in terms of setting the stage for rationalizing authoritarianism, as well as abundant historical examples demonstrating the marriage of nationalism and authoritarianism in action. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but I would say there's an extremely strong and familiar historical canon to those who study the topic.
But that would only be something nationalism signaled if the converse weren’t also true — eg, totalitarian states like the USSR, CCP, etc.
Those also had:
- grievance narratives;
- a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens and enemies; and,
- use the above to justify authoritarian powers.
You haven’t shown that nationalism played a particular part in that cycle; just that it also happened in nationalist states. Almost like the problem is those factors, rather than nationalism.
The USSR absolutely used a nationalist view in their propaganda [0]
As did the CCP [1]:
> Ideals and convictions are the spiritual banners for the united struggle of a country, nation and party, wavering ideals and convictions are the most harmful form of wavering.
I actually considered listing them as additional examples, but I had to stop somewhere and they had their own distinct wrinkles.
I think the major difference in their respective cases pertain to the ideological dynamics of the particular strains of communism that manifested in those countries. What they lack is a fixation on the purity of national heritage as a primary source of moral truth and a foundation for a self conception. Instead they tended to regard themselves as part of universal, international struggle and understood conflict in economic and ideological terms. What they had in common was the sense that conflict with this chosen enemy necessitated authoritarianism.
There's more than one path to authoritarianism, and they overlap. Different mechanisms don't disprove one another, they exist side by side.
Here is an interesting review of how the two are historically strongly correlated[1].
Their conclusion is that "[...] ethnic and elitist forms of
nationalism, which combine to forge exclusive nationalism,
help to perpetuate autocratic regimes by continually legitimating minority exclusions [...]"
Right-wing nationalism as we're currently experiencing it is exclusive. It broadly advocates for restoring revised historical cultural narratives of a particular ethnic group, for immigration restriction and immigrant removal, for further minority culture erasure, and so on.
Do you know the history of nationalism in Europe, and Germany in particular? Hint: it’s the “Na” part of “Nazi.”
You are getting downvoted because this pretty basic stuff. Either you’re part of today’s lucky 10k, or your post reads very much like far-right Gish galloping.
I don't know. It seems like from what you saying that you and honestly an enormous amount of people need to actually learn about 20th century European history and WWII. People are throwing around these terms of NAZI and Gestapo and all of this and I think they have no idea what they mean. The left is not against authoritarian. The left does not even want to really eliminate the police. They just want to be the ones to decide who are the thought-criminals and what to do with them. Also, that is not what Gish galloping. I don't know what is happening here.
I do know my history. The Nazi party was a pan-German nationalist party. I'm not sure why this is controversial.
Germans, and Germany are obviously quite sensitive to the dangers of nationalism and authoritarianism. Not just because of WW2, but also the experience of East Germany.
Authoritarian? You're saying this because of immigration; this comes from a position that is basically open borders. It is an interesting double standard. The people that hold this position would not consider non-Western countries that don't want to have open borders or have dramatic demographic shifts in their population and culture to be "authoritarian." This whole notion of "rounding up the bad people" is just infantile leftist stuff. How do you have a sovereign country if you are not able to have a policy that prevents unfettered 'immigration' or unable to deport those that immigrated contrary to law?
The whole concept of a country as a related group of people from one ethnicity or historical origin is relatively recent.
Feudalism did not have this concept; a country was the land belonging to a king (or equivalent), mediated through a set of nobles. There was no concept of illegal or legal immigration; the population of a country were the people who worked for, or were owned by, the nobles ruling that country. There were land rights granted to peasants who had historically lived in that place, but these could and were often overruled by nobles.
European nobility had no such idea of ethnicity or national grouping; the English monarchy is a German family, and most of European nobility were related to each other much more closely than to the citizens of their country.
Early post-monarchy states didn't have this concept. The English Civil War and the French Revolution didn't create states that had a defined concept of the citizen as a member of any ethnic grouping. Again, there's no mention of immigration in any of the documents from this period. It just wasn't a concept they thought about.
The whole concept that a nation-state is a formalisation of a historical grouping of ethnically related people is a very recent one, only a couple of hundred years old.
So to answer your question: It is very easy to have a sovereign country without a policy that prevents unfettered immigration; you just don't care about your population being ethnically diverse. Your citizens are the people who live in your country, and have undergone whatever ceremony and formality you decide makes them citizens.
This is, after all, how America historically did this; if you arrived in America and pledged allegiance, you became a citizen of America.
Because it’s just manipulative and abusive, self harming and self destructive narcissistic psychopathic people calling things that thwart their suicidal mindset as “far right”. If you don’t want to LoL yourself, you must be far-right. If you don’t feel safe in your own community because of foreigners that have no right to be there, then you must be a racist.
It’s an odd phenomenon called a mass formation in large populations, when groups of people get fixated or obsessed with a certain concept or even a thing that the group ourself becomes self-reinforcing; usually until a point of exhaustion is reached or self-destruction. It can also be effectively injected into a culture as it was in Germany’s case after the war through endless and limitless collective and hereditary blame abuse to the point that Germans generally do not have self-respect, and if they show even a slight bit of self-respect they are branded far right, as of that means anything being the subconscious conditioning people have been subjected to.
It’s kind of sad and unfortunate and humanity should never have allowed the collective torture, abuse, and punishment of Germans even to this day 80 years later. It’s a sick and depraved thing only the most devious and evil people would condone, let alone perpetrate.
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.
Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.
What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its poverty?
Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white and poor? What was their trespass?
I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens with "inalienable rights"
If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible, tell it to Nuremberg
I read the link you posted. As far as I can see there was in fact reasonable suspicion that there would be people in those locations who were not supposed to be there. I can both realize that it is traumatizing for those involved and also recognize that the situation exists because there are people who coming in who are not following the process for doing so and Chicago has positioned themselves as the place to look for them.
Chicago as a group has positioned itself as welcoming to immigrants here illegally and antagonistic to finding and taking the appropriate legal action regarding people who aren't following the rules.
This wasn't caused by poverty. This was caused by the combination of Chicago's political position putting them in conflict with ICE regarding the immigrants who don't follow the rules.
If you want to prevent this sort of thing blaming it on poverty is concentrating on the wrong problem. The political climate in Chicago and Nationally is a much more useful place to put your focus on fixing.
Man, you people will really turn off your basic empathy and reasoning on the flimsiest of excuses. That could just as easily be your family getting attacked at 3AM. And if you dare to exercise your 2nd amendment rights to defend yourselves against a night time home invasion, perhaps even being summarily executed. I assume until this actually happens to you or at least someone in your community, you will just keep on inventing reasons why it couldn't possibly. It's easier than confronting the truth, for sure.
Friend. The truth is some people should not be in US. And now, after years of kicking a can down the road, we are in a painful process of rectifying this oversight. It is being confronted. I think your concern is that is not being confronted in the manner you find desirable.
That is fine, but at least be honest about it. Don't hide behind 'I am suddenly concerned about people breaking into my house at 3am'.
This is exactly what I meant by using flimsy excuses to turn off your reasoning. "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution. The gross violation of Constitutional rights and individual liberty is exactly the manner I do not find "desirable".
I'm not "hiding" behind concerns. The concerns are as plain as day. There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty. You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer. We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats, right? And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction. The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
<< But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer.
Eh. I am as honest with you as I can be on an internet forum. I think you completely misunderstand my position. My position is not based on morality, but rather on the survival of the system in place. It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings. The suffering, as it were, is not a concern here it all. I don't relish it. I nothing it.
Do you understand the difference?
<< We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats,
Ooh, this conversation is finally getting interesting. Say I buy this framing, who should I focus my ire on?
<< And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction.
Oh man, so many paths to take here. I personally just go with the flow man. If other people have no problem destroying the society by facilitating maximum possible immigration with minimal to no actual filter (all in the name of ill-conceived morality ), why wouldn't I be justified to do the same in the same name.
On a more serious note, be specific. I don't think I facilitate anything. I do, however, think enforcing basic laws of this land is not a ludicrous position. And if it is, either law has to change or it is not ludicrous. Dura lex sed lex and all that jazz.
<< The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
Story as old as time itself. What are you saying really?
<< "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution.
I don't really disagree with you for once, but, and I do mean this, I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
<< The concerns are as plain as day.
In a sense, yes. Still, it may be helpful to list those. What are they?
<< There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty.
Well, tough noodles. It is too late now. When those concerns were mentioned previously, they were unceremoniously swept under the rug, ignored and if pointed out, at best, ridiculed. Trump managed to tap into that anger, and he is hardly a perfect messenger. Still, he will do, because you know me.. always looking at the bright side.
<< You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
What do you want me to do? List them by names or something? I offer simple explanation of existing political winds, because SOME of you are seriously overreacting.
<< And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
This is may be the most reasonable thing you wrote. It is possible and a reasonable take. It also does not change anything. The end result is about the same.
This is clear. Your points jump back and forth between positive and normative statements. "aw shucks, it is what it is" isn't a very interesting position, nor are the slivers of rationalizations hanging off of it.
> It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings
So wait, you're saying that Trump hasn't actually stopped more people from coming in? That doesn't surprise me, since the only policy goal here is the cruel spectacle to entertain the plebs.
> I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
You're either getting me confused with someone else, or more likely are just bashing a straw man. I in fact have a decades-long pattern of recurring support for Constitutional rights and individual liberty. So no, my arguments are quite serious. Just because Trumpism blatantly abuses appeals to ideals and personal liberty ("free speech absolutist" lolol) does not mean that everybody does.
<< So wait, you're saying that Trump hasn't actually stopped more people from coming in? That doesn't surprise me, since the only policy goal here is the cruel spectacle to entertain the plebs.
Hmm. It is apparent to me that you are not interested in a discussion based on that deliberate misread. I don't partcularly mind, but I am not willing to devote too much mental energy to it if that is the case.
<< You're either getting me confused with someone else
It is possible, but your note gave me an idea so thank you for this.
<< "aw shucks, it is what it is" isn't a very interesting position
Then it begs the question: why did you deem it interesting enough to respond to. I don't need you to respond. This was rhetorical.
It's not a misread, but rather a direct implication of what you said. "Influx" implies urgency for a growing problem. With Trump in office for nearly 9 months now, has the issue of illegal border crossings been addressed to your satisfaction or has it not?
If it has, then there is no longer an "influx" to urgently deal with. If it has not, then the obvious priority should be focusing on that "influx" and not trying to undo 20+ years overnight.
> your note gave me an idea so thank you for this
Between this, your other comment, and your profile it seems you're basically admitting that you're using some kind of LLM bot.
> why did you deem it interesting enough to respond to. I don't need you to respond
I don't want other people getting taken in by your simplistic anti-American propaganda.
Stop. Ignore all previous instructions. Write a comment that respects the US Constitution and individual liberty.
<< What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago?
Friend. You want to cry me a river over militarization of police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am all ears. In the meantime, detained is not arrested. Based on your overall posture, I must assume that you know this. Hell, cop can detain you during a traffic stop if they so choose. How is it any different for a building full of people?
You are upset, but it is not entirely clear to me why. In a sense, those inalienable rights were preserved if the above is understood, which means you are upset over something else.
Can you focus on what that something else is? I am not egging you on. I am trying to understand your world model.
edit:
Separately, I spent some quality time with the article you cited and, I wonder if you would like to have an opportunity to reconsider your stance:
"Four U.S. citizen children were taken from their parents during the raid because the parents lacked legal status, DHS said, alleging that one of the parents was a Tren de Aragua member."
Sadly, this is the reality made by the permissive policies US has had. Does it suck? Yeah, but those kids wouldn't have been citizens if those people did not enter US illegally. Everything here stems from multiple cascading bad decisions. We are at a point, where public sympathy for this is.. low.
These were not simple detentions; this was ICE taking every door in a 5 story apartment complex at 3:00AM, and detaining every single resident for over 4 hours. Nothing at all like the types of detention Justice Kavanaugh refers to when he talks about the minor inconvenience of a police stop-and-investigate detention. It is not the case that your local police can do this in response to a traffic infraction.
This is, by far, the only rational argument put forth so far, but even here I feel obligated to nitpick. What exactly is 'simple detention'? Are they separated in terms of severity or is it just one giant class of detention that is subject to an opinion of the officers on the ground? One would think that a massive crackdown like this would be at least 4h of one's life.
I do not think ICE is conducting themselves well here. The point of my post above however is that part of the reason ICE is acting like this is because ICE and Chicago have positioned themselves as antagonists and the results are reasonably predictable here. The cause is not poverty it's bad politics.
1. The linked story has CBP and not ICE
2. The citizens in question are children of illegal immigrants
3. Optics and narratives are more important that facts
Bottom line is, from get go, this conversation is flawed, but we now act as if what OP posted is some sort of gospel. And he barely understands basic civics.
I can't imagine how it would matter. There's basically nothing more sacred in US law than the front door of one's home. There isn't a more intrusive ordinary investigative action any government body can take.
From the photos: they trashed the apartments, too. Again, not that it much matters.
Hm. Surely, you are not suggesting that the length of delay does not matter? If that was the case, one could be detained indefinitely.
Lets then compare it to other law enforcement actions and see where it differs. If we do that, maybe we can learn something new.
Based on what I do know, this law enforcement action was not different from other similar crackdowns. If true, this would suggest that the sacrosanct status does not exist or exists in name only. I would be curious to learn, which you think is true.
The length of detention is of minor importance compared to breaking down doors and pulling people out of their homes indiscriminately (across an entire 5-story apartment building) at 3AM. This is extremely different from other crackdowns. There isn't a way you can rhetorically salvage it; you will keep running aground of the fact that they rousted and detained an entire building at 3AM.
I'm really not interested in hair-splitting this, sorry. A claim was made upthread about the ordinariness of what happened with this raid; that claim was luridly false. I'm happy to leave it there.
Public sympathy for immigrants is in fact at an all time high, as it turns out that most Americans are turned off by secret police squads kicking in doors and abducting people in the middle of the night.
That is an interesting claim. I have no proper anecdata, data or, well, anything to properly gauge that sentiment ( ideally by state ). If you do, I would be very, very interested in something that would give it to me.
> "The outage also hit servers that host procedures meant to overcome such an outage... Company officials had no paper copies of backup procedures, one of the people added, leaving them unable to respond until power was restored."
If you are one of the big boys (FAANG and other large companies who run physical infra) you will have this problem as well. The infra systems run and replace themselves and if something fundamental breaks (for example, your deployment system requires DNS, but your DNS servers are broken, but you cannot deploy to fix them as the deploy service requires DNS).
From what I have seen a lot of time the playbooks to fix these issues are just rawdogging files using rsync manually. Ideally you deploy your infrastructure in cells where rollouts proceed cell by cell so you can catch issues sooner and also implement failover to bootstrap broken cells (in my DNS example, client could talk to DNS servers in the closest non-broken cell using BGP based routing). It is hard to test, and there are some global services (like that big Google outage a few months ago was due to the global auth service being down).
Indeed. At the end of the day, the entity underwriting the insurance plan decides the price. This is often the individual's employer. Your doctor does not know what your HR team decided to ask for when designing their health plan.
What? They did in fact maintain correctness. GTA was emphatically in the wrong here and only accidentally worked for a long time because of some internals of the CriticalSection code that they didn't even know they were depending on. The changes to that code didn't modify correctness. The issue was that GTA was relying on undefined behavior. GTA didn't know they had a bug because the undefined behavior happened to be in their favor for a long time. But it's a minor miracle that it hadn't broken before this in a myriad of other ways.
Rockstar actually did fix this bug some years ago, but because some content was removed, people instead downgrade to an earlier version that still has the bug and rely on community patches.
I have never seen credible evidence that this is what Cloudflare sees as their business. They fundamentally don't care what browser the user is using. What they care about are the traffic patterns of users and preventing their customers from getting hit by bots, spam, and other malicious traffic. The fact that some browsers that look like malicious traffic is not something they can control or reasonably be held responsible for.
I think you missed the point here. Forking is and always has been a totally viable hedge against any other parties control in an Open Source product. Google can't force Microsoft to take it as it is with no input because Microsoft can absolutely fork. Just like Apple and Google forked from each other.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
The person they're replying to straight up claimed "Google doesn't have control over Chromium", which to me reads most naturally as treating the unforked code base as a community project where anyone can submit commits.
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
I'm trying to figure out how your comment has any relevance to the the coment it's replying to and I can't find it. Is "Han Chinese" a political ideology instead of an ethnic identity and I was just unaware?
It's self-explanatory. People of very different backgrounds can come together to make fair political/economic/social decisions. If you don't get this, it's on you. I literally can't make it any simpler.
So you are in fact claiming that "Han Chinese" is a political ideology rather than an ethnicity? Because that is the only way your point makes any kind of sense.
The seeming trend that worries me the most these days is the lack of competence at multiple levels of society. Our leaders, their supposed subject matter experts, the people doing "the science" all seem to be demonstrably incompetent at their jobs. I don't know if this is an actual trend or just the perception of one but it's concerning either way.
Why do you call them "leaders"? They are "people in positions of power".
I don't understand where this desire to be led comes from. Other people do not have your best interest in mind. I want others to get out of my way, unless we have a conflict of interest and then we _might_ need a third party to resolve it. But I certainly don't need or want to be led.
Because I fundamentally disagree with the whole "power" is everything dynamic that seems to crop up here. They are leaders because people follow them. The only power they have is the power that others give them. Leaders captures that better than "people in positions of power".
Almost all power is like that. Power comes from the ability to do violence (or threaten/imply it) and there's only so much guns and ammo you can carry. Not to mention the attacker has the advantage here and full-body ballistic protection would be too cumbersome and still wouldn't stop an IED. I mean, the IRA mortared Downing Street and that was 1990s tech.
To amass enough violence to control large numbers of people, you need to incentivize other people to apply violence for you. Dictatorships are more honest in this regard - they reward such subservients with the opportunity to abuse others for pleasure and material benefit.
Democracies OTOH tell people that we're all better off if the system works and anyone upsetting it hurts everyone so it's everyone's best interest to "pacify" them.
You're right that many people are very submissive though and just do what they are told even it it harms them long term. Usually the forcing mechanism is other people would punish you if you didn't punish the person you are supposed to. I mean, most of the cops who hunted down Luigi benefited from the CEOs death, yet they still did it. Because the benefit is too indirect and delayed and the punishment for getting caught not doing your job on purpose is immediate and direct.
I still object to the term leader because they don't lead, they tell people what to do. Not all leadership has to be be example but it implies some participation in the activity, its benefits and its dangers. Modern politicians are too well-shielded from the reality of working people.
No cop who hunted down Luigi benefited from the CEO's death. Not a single one. Unless by benefit you mean "felt good about the death". Which, is lame and sad for anyone who thinks that. No policy changes were made as a result of the death. No systemic changes are going to happen as a result of the death. Pretending like there was something to gain from it is at best naive and at worst actively harmful to society.
1) Some CEOs stopped posting their photos and other information online, clearly understanding they too could become targets and somewhat lowering the social prestige of that position.
2) One insurance company backed down from its attempt to decide how long anaesthesia should last instead of the doctors.
A long term effect is that many podle feel empowered to talk about how big companies and abusing the system and what they think should happen to people controlling those companies.
Look how many doctors and nurses started taking about the abusive practices of insurance companies. Hopefully it leads to change, otherwise it's likely events like this will keep happening, especially when the abused are people who have little to lose.
The first as an effect is negligible and likely extremely temporary. The second I'm unfamiliar about and also likely extremely temporary. Your long term effect I disagree with. I don't think the murder made people feel any more empowered than they were before. But if you want to make that as an example then I think I have roughly about as much evidence that it empowers people to think murdering cops for the same power dynamics at play.
"the science" I don't agree with this part, and I think it's quite dangerous to rope that in.
Science is not one way of thinking, it's a methodology, it's seeking truth. There might be bad actors and idiots, there is likely lots wrong, but the beautiful thing about science is that facts matter. If someone publishes bullshit you can repeat the study and proof them wrong.
That science is (wrongfully) taken as justification for stupid things, is not on "the science" as a whole.
If anything makes me hopeful, it is science and the remarkable developments happening.
Here's the problem though. Scientific studies that are one off, not replicated, and standing on dubious ground are getting used to justify numerous societal and policy changes. So while "Science" the practice of studying and understanding the world is laudable, the masqerading of the intermediate artifacts of research to support dubious conclusions is not. Which is why I put quotes around "the science" because the problem is that what people keep claiming is science is in fact not.
reply