Oh good, a Bottomless Pit of Endless Wonder. I'm sure this isn't full of tangents and waffle designed to obfuscate a poor argument.
Kirbmarc wrote: ↑Tue Oct 09, 2018 1:05 am
Social reforms like gay marriage, divorce and abortion rights have become parts of the mainstream by now. They're all positive developments from a secular, non-religious perspective, so going back from there is a staple of the right-wing religious conservatives. I don't see any point in walking back from those ideas from a secular perspectivre. Since they're accepted across the board any movement that wants to walk back from those is, by defintion, reactionary, just like after interracial marriage was made legal any movement that wants to walk back from there is reactionary.
It's completely beyond the scope of my point, but I believe there's an entirely secular argument against gay marriage. It relies on the purpose of government, and what interest the government has in the personal relationships of its citizens. I do not believe government should be in the business of regulating its citizens private lives (See China's social credit for the extreme that path leads too). The only reason governments took an interest in marriage was because that was the unit from which to best support the next generation of citizens, children. Something that doesn't apply to gay marriage, but does to interracial marriage. Pretty much everything else you can achieve from marriage, such as automatic visitation rights in hospital, I don't really have a problem with, but marriage itself isn't necessary for. I'd argue that if supporting the nuclear family is no longer a priority, which it doesn't seem to be, then there is no reason for the government to be issuing marriage licenses at all, and it should stop doing so entirely.
However, my actual point, as I'm sure you weren't obtuse enough to miss, was that it was the "conservative" government that passed this legislation. If it was a "liberal" government (lower case L) that passed it, I wouldn't have brought it. My point was that the mainstream "right wing" parties are hardly worthy of the name. It was also done within the past year, hardly the bowels of history to be considered "reactionary".
Completely Open Borders is an extremist position that is more performative than real, at least for now. The problem is that there's a lack of discussion of a pragmatic middle ground between the Trump position of giving zero tolerance to immigration from certain areas, and of giving zero amnesties to illegal immigrants no matter the consequences, and the idea that borders are inherently oppressive and all those who want to come should be let in. As I've written Ronald Reagan, not exactly a SJW, was in favor of limited amnesty for illegal immigrants, similar to DACA.
I don't have a problem with the way Australia handles illegal immigration, except in its used as a cover for the high amounts of legal immigration. We had a trade minister who openly suggested that Australian citizenship should be for sale. I think this analogy is accurate: it's like cordial, a small amount is okay, even makes things better. Once the proportion of cordial to water gets too high, however, the entire thing becomes undrinkable.
The far-right position is the one based on the idea that immigration from certain areas is an erosion of "national identity", and civic integration is largely impossible. The SocJus idea is that all immmigration is beneficial, and any sort of requirement for immigrants and incentive to integration is racism and oppression. There's little talk about a sensible middle-ground which tries to conjugate economic requirements, culturally civic integration, and tries to regulate immigration fluxes rather than simpoly lifting borders or closing them. Most of the discussion is about SocJus or Alt-Right virtue signalling.
Completely irrelevant to my argument. I think immigration has been so high for so long, that we need a complete shut down of pretty much ALL immigration for a while to allow us to digest and integrate the newer arrivals. Continuing the high rate of immigration Australia currently has is a recipe for social strife.
Economics is the elephant in the room. Very few people discuss wage freeze, or unemployment and underemployment, or predatory loans, or the gradual erosion of workers' rights. GDP growth seems to be the only thing that matters. This actually ties in with immigration. Immigration is economically positive in some sectors, but it's not so positive in others, especially if it's combined with wage freeze or even wage reduction. The economic model of hiring cheap foreign labor is one of the reasons why immigration causes some social issues among the working class. This is a point which is often overlooked.
Not by me, and again, tangential to my point. GDP per capita is better metric. The trouble with any metric, however, is that it ends up becoming your target, and that ignores the intangibles. That said, I'm entirely prepared to eat some short term economic harm now to avoid social strife later on (which will also bring economic harm).
An alt-right project of "cultural defense" is likely to assume that all forms of immigration are the same, in all economic sectors, just like the SocJus Open Borders model seems to think that the only important thing is allowing people to come in, regardless of whether this creates or destroys economic opportunities for the working class. In some sectors immigration is required due to worker shortage, but not every part of economics is the same, and you can't simply reduce job opportunities for the native working class in the name of GDP growth and expect no backlash.
Again, I'm not sure who you're arguing with here. However, I do think there are strategic reasons for protectionism for certain industries. Automobile manufacturing, computer chip manufacture, that kind of thing. If for no other reason, that in the event of invasion, those factories can be easily converted to a war footing. Additionally, Bloomberg reported the other day that potentially thousands of outsourced computer products from China may have had secret chips added to the network architecture allowing the Chinese to easily compromise any computer system those parts are attached to. Relying on a geopolitical competitor that has fundamentally different values to you for your defence is just asking for trouble. Finally, "worker shortage" just means you aren't prepared to pay what local citizens demand, not necessarily that there is a real shortage. Some of this is certainly brought on by corporate greed. Australia's supermarket duopoly have near destroyed our dairy industry, for example.
That's the problem, I think. This kind of hyperbolic, apocalyptic ideas about the "twilight of the west" or the "survival of the nation" are what characterizes the far right. There are economic or social or cultural issues about immigration, but thinking that the survival of the nation is a dangerous exaggeration that can motivate decisions based not on improving living standards, or promoting integration, but on simply getting those who are perceived to be a danger out of the country, no matter how integrated they are, or their behavior.
I didn't say "twilight of the west", I said "Australia's survival". In our life times we've seen more than one country collapse because of poor government decisions. At least one was relatively wealthy with large amounts of exportable resources. So don't pretend it can't happen. I'm also relatively black pilled on the idea of the "End of History". There is nothing fundamentally different about our current nations, I think, then there was about Rome or the Mayan Empires. I think it is entirely possible that many of us on this board will live to see the US lose it's global superpower status, and China have the military and economic might to dictate global politics. Given how China treats its own minorities, and whips up anti-Japanese sentiment among its citizens, that is not a scenario that we should welcome. The US military did put out a white paper during the Obama administration that said it expected the Chinese to exceed their capabilities by mid-century.
It's not about "gassing the Jews". It's about basing one's approach to immigration on apocalyptic premises, and characterizing all immigrants from certain parts of the world as a potential existential danger. It's about an approach that doesn't allow room for integration within a common legal framework, and sees different cultures as an inherent threat to an alleged cultural essence.
Again, you're not arguing with me here. I would say that race is coarse proxy for culture. I'd also say that humans need cultural cohesion. They need to feel their neighbours are on the same side as them. That can only happen if they are all aligned to the same goal of the improvement of the nation. People who think their own culture is evil and all others, even those that are demonstrably inferior, are better, are part of the problem, but so is a large number of people from those inferior cultures that have no intention of integration.
Cultural mixing is actually a very good thing, provided that one preserves liberal democratic principles. People who immigrate and integrate successfully can be a huge resource. The American melting pot has been a source of strength. Preserving identity at all costs in the face of change is reactionary.
Again, I'd point to the cordial analogy. I do think the idea of a unified earth under a one world "liberal democracy" government is about one of the worst dystopias I can think of. Maybe that's where we disagree?
I'm also not convinced that "reactionary" politics are inherently bad. Haven't read enough Moldbug maybe, but the ideas I've encountered so far can't be dismissed out of hand to my view.
The trick is getting policies right to favor the right kind of immigration, to preserve liberal democratic values, to create jobs and opportunities rather than to suppress them, to promote mixing and social peace rather than identitarian movements and social unrest, to deal with issues by an evidence-based, result-oriented approach rather than on the basis of emotional outrage and identitarian essentialism.
Again, not sure who you're arguing with.
The problems I have with the alt-right/alt-lite is that they're apocalyptic and essentialist. Like in Lauren Southern video, where she went around filming non-white people in Paris and argued that this was the end of France. Even if you concedes that she wasn't talking about race but culture (and that's a point which is hard to argue in the face of her choosing to specifically film non-white people) what exactly is the big cultural issue with people peacefully going on about their business? There was a dude doing the same thing in an Australian supermarket, going around filming non-white people doing their shopping. What's the point of these videos from a non-racist, cultural perspective?
Not sure who you're arguing with here either, certainly not me. As I said above, I do think race is a coarse proxy for culture, but that's about as close as I come. It's not the race that disturbs me so much as the clear signs I see of people who have no intention of integrating. I've said my Nepalese neighbour has an Australian flag beach towel. That's about as bogan as you can get, and I have no problem with that. On the other hand, encountering a woman in a Niqāb being lead around by a man with an unruly beard in a gown shows no sign of attempting to integrate.
Their point would have been much stronger if those people were filming people carrying around signs about how "Democracy should go to hell" or "Islam will conquer the world", as it has happened in the UK plenty of times. Or if they were making a point about FGM in non-white communities in France or Australia,. Those are cultural practices which are easy to argue to be a threat to French or Australian liberal-democratic, secular values. But the idea that just by existing and walking around the streets of Paris or an Australian supermarket non-white people are a threat to French or Australian culture is hard to justify from a non-racial, cultural point of view.
Again, absolutely nothing to do with anything my arguments against you're point.
I said that the two important issues for me is dramatically reducing immigration and anti-SocJus. Neither of the mainstream parties provides any home for me. You agree with me that neither of these issues makes someone "far-right". Therefore the idea that voting for a party that advocates along these lines is inherently unreasonable is false. I didn't encounter a counter argument in that waffle, so I'm not sure what the point was.