Was Brendan a white nationalist or white supremacist? The article cited him as being the leader of a white nationalist group, but then used the phrase "white supremacist" throughout the article, so it's a little unclear what his original starting point was.
Yes, it’s unfair to compare people who want expel nonwhite people from the country to people who want to treat nonwhite people as not-people, because we know those groups don’t overlap at all.
I’ve heard racist nationalists express genuine praise for other nations, so long as they’re their own. The internal dialogue might be that “they” are sending their worst “here” to dress and speak and act like “us.”
I have a mixed heritage that can physically resemble anyone between Italy and India, as well as Central America. It’s wild to see dispositions shift as folks learn my “real” background (Germanic, technically though not precisely Austrian-Swiss, and Indian). The former get skewered for it, but it’s just as prevalent in the East.
It's fair. What's unfair is to use the wrong words, which create the wrong worlds. When your pet barks, do you call it cat?
Humans are blessed with a higher level of communication, there's no reason to abuse it. There's no good reason to be lazy. There's no good reason to take pride in negligence.
Step up. Lean in. Or for the sake of truth and justice, just shut up*. We've got enough noise to have to contend with fools who effectively don't know green from yellow.
* Not you, but the collective of people who believe Orwellian newspeak-y speak it ok.
The only people(s) who get fucked by wrong, lazy, and ambiguous communication is the sender and the receiver. That is, using the wrong words gives the subject matter a free pass. How can something be addressed and resolved when there's deception and ambiguity?
p.s. Hating haters isn't exactly clean and consistent either. But that's another chat for another day.
>It's a little unclear where the distinction lies between the two. "White nationalist" overlaps with and kinda implies "white supremacist".
I don't think this distinction is unclear.
In and of itself, a racial nationalist's beliefs might be something close to "I prefer to live in a country with my own people."
In and of itself, a racial supremacist's beliefs might be something close to "My people are inherently superior and should rule over others."
Anyway, I'm mainly just interested in this person's starting point and the effect that his trip had on him, as well as calling out the media for not being precise about these issues. Nationalist and Supremacist are not synonyms: that's lazy click-baiting journalism.
“Of the Gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they shall. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted on it. We did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time. And we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.”
"America is a nation of immigrants" isn't an appeal here, it's a statement of fact. Ethnic homogeneity, by any definition of white, would require removal of very large parts of the population.
"america is a nation of immigrants" makes a normative claim ("we should be in favor of immigration") based on historical fact ("people moved here in the past"). using one to justify the other is what is called "an appeal to tradition". why is this historical fact privileged over the historical fact of genocide? this is an appeal to a tradition among many. let me know if you need your hand held further.
why is this historical fact privileged over the historical fact of genocide?
The pertinent fact is that immigrants are here now --- this is not just history or tradition, it is current reality.
Genocide would be an amoral effort to alter this existing reality and enforce "white nationalism" --- by those who obviously think skin color makes them "superior" in some way and grants them to right to oppress or even kill "other" immigrants.
Attempting to justify this by past genocide is an "appeal to tradition".
> Nothing short of genocide can realistically create this here.
What about white flight and gentrification? As far as I'm aware, there are extensive legal and governmental measures in place in the US (such as placing low-income housing deliberately to decrease homogeneity [1]) to prevent people from ethnically self-sorting.
The distinction is unclear because "my own people" is such a nebulous concept when you're talking about a nation of millions. For example, for a "white nation", does "my own people" include Dutch Quakers? What about Irish Catholics? What about Italians? What about Jews? You will get a different answer depending on which white nationalist you ask. Thus the common element among many white nationalists is not actually wanting to live with one's own people, but exclusions of specific outgroups that are deemed inferior.
"my own people" in this case means "people that look like me, and have a somewhat similar culture/lifestyle". So obviously it is a bit unclear and you won't be able to get a perfect list of allowed/not allowed group, but it does not imply inferiority at all.
The average Christian white nationalist has more in common, culturally, with a Muslim immigrant from the Middle East than with a staunch atheist like myself. But I would probably be welcomed in a "white nation" because of my appearance. If we're being very generous, white nationalism is intellectually lazy since it uses superficial traits like skin color as shorthand for culture/lifestyle when the two are, at best, loosely connected. But I think it's extremely naive to look at the history of white nationalist ideas and assume that superiority/inferiority is not implicit in the ideology.
It is definitely lazy and superficial, but it does not necessarily make for a terrible indicator. We are much more receptive to color than small shape variation, by removing the former you are preventing (or at the very least mitigating) comparison and the creation of stereotypes.
Now I am not from the US so I won't comment about history, and I can fully believe that there is some link between being a white nationalist and believing one "race" to be superior to the others, but I do not believe that this is a reason enough to disqualify the idea.
Do we really need journalists and readers spending effort dwelling on the intellectual distinctions between white supremacism and white nationalism? Is that a topic of discussion our society needs to focus on? What practical difference does it make in describing existing political movements?
If there were some white nationalist group that espoused moving to predominantly white countries (or really starting their own country [0]), while being completely tolerant of the domestic state of affairs and distancing themselves from those who seek to turn this has-always-been-diverse country into their desired ethnostate, then perhaps the distinction would be relevant. But lacking that, it's a distinction without a difference.
[0] I don't know that there are any countries that are predominantly "white" but not better defined by a more specific term. It would seem that "white" nationalism is itself the product of "miscegenation" between various traditional nationalities. Nobody really balks at "$traditionally_white_nationality pride", or even larger pan- terms like European or Slavic pride. It's the attempt to take credit for nothing more than a lighter skin tone that is the problem.
White nationalists are usually ethnostate advocates with a veneer of "peaceful displacement" - a thing that doesn't exist. When pressed, their ideology always turns into white supremacy, genocide or both.
No, it is not. Populations naturally evolve, but they never spontaneously evolve to whatever your arbitrary definition of pure white is. Nobody is orchestrating this, and "white" people (quotes because that's quite a moving target) aren't going extinct. Low birth rates aren't replacement, and unless you want to blame our standard of living, they aren't genocide either.
I guess it'd be a more interesting question if you asked who caused the upcoming global climate refugee crisis.
> In and of itself, a racial supremacist's beliefs might be something close to "My people are inherently superior and should rule over others."
Supremacism in this context means wanting your group to have control in a multiethnic state. It’s not intrinsically tied to questions of inherent superiority or global domination. So not that different from nationalism.
In other words, it endows one chosen race of immigrants with special qualities and status that makes it "superior" to others. And this special quality of "superiority" (skin color) is not earned but rather gifted.
It's very difficult for a non-Chinese person to get citizenship in China. Chinese people like interacting with people of other races, but it goes without saying that China is for the Chinese.
Racism doesn't require a sense of superiority, but rather a preference for race(s). I'm not offended that I can't get citizenship in China. Do you think they think they're better than you?
Racism doesn't require a sense of superiority, but rather a preference for race(s).
Yes and Hitler obviously preferred aryans --- but there is obviously more to the story.
"White nationalism" is clearly not merely a statement of preference. It is the belief and objective that white people should dominate society. Why? On what basis? Because Jesus was white (he wasn't)?
"White nationalism" is not about superiority --- it is just a "preference" for oppressing others in order to achieve dominance. Thanks for the clarification/word play.
>> Do you think they think they're better than you?
That was not a rhetorical question.
> Yes and Hitler obviously preferred aryans --- but there is obviously more to the story.
True. There are different levels of racism. Some are enough to maintain an ethnicity, and others go way beyond that.
> "White nationalism" is not about superiority --- it is just a "preference" for oppressing others in order to achieve dominance. Thanks for the clarification/word play.
Are Chinese nationalists oppressive because they don't just open the borders? It's clear that you have a different standard for white people.
Are Chinese nationalists oppressive because they don't just open the borders?
No. Simply closing their border is not oppressive but just like in the US, it is not enough to produce an ethnocentric society.
It's clear that you have a different standard for white people.
No, the standard is the same. And to illustrate, you've picked a nearly perfect analog for US "white nationalists" with the Han Chinese.
What China is doing to the Uyghurs and what "white nationalists" in the US want for "non-whites" is oppression. This is the only way to achieve their ethnocentric objectives.
In both cases, the objective is built around ethnic superiority and is equally racist and reprehensible and amoral and inhumane.
Can you answer the question: do you think the Chinese (or any nationality) think they're better than you when they won't let you become a citizen?
> No. Simply closing their border is not oppressive but just like in the US, it is not enough to produce an ethnocentric society.
It's enough to maintain one.
> This is the only way to achieve their ethnocentric objectives.
In that part of China, sure.
> In both cases, the objective is built around ethnic superiority and is equally racist and reprehensible and amoral and inhumane.
Name one ethnicity that couldn't be construed as such. Respecting the rights of individuals is not how ethnicities are constructed. Liberalism destroys ethnicities, yet liberals have decided not to be evenhanded about it because it's not politically expedient. That's how you produce more intense forms of racism.
For the overwhelming majority of cases, the difference is one is the motte and the other the bailey. Maybe there are some out there that are truly nationalists without feeling superior, but this has got to be very rare. If you didn't believe in supremacy (even just feeling culturally superior) why would you have a problem with people coming in? You'd only be a nationalist if you feel you'd lose something and end up in an inferior position.
> If you didn't believe in supremacy (even just feeling culturally superior) why would you have a problem with people coming in?
Because you value your kin and culture, and wish to preserve them. Or because you believe other people have in-group preference, which means your group will be worse off from increased competition. It's no different than a new pack of wolves moving into another pack's territory. From that point of view, the absence of self-superiority beliefs increases nationalism, since if the other group is equal or better, they are more competitively dangerous.
Great point, I completely disagree with this viewpoint but I can understand the POV. If you view the world as a zero sum game and that cultures meeting act like wolves fighting over territory, then you can hold a nationalist view without supremacy. Unfortunately this world view is the zeitgeist (manifesting across the political spectrum), and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> If you view the world as a zero sum game and that cultures meeting act like wolves fighting over territory, then you can hold a nationalist view without supremacy.
I don't think you need to see it as a zero sum game. Only that conflict, violent or otherwise, is likely, and often organized along ethnic lines.
We could look at history to try to assess how true that is, but that would be a boring debate. I'm more interested in your opinion of my first point, which you skipped: what if you value your kin and culture? When it comes to biodiversity, other species, or even obscure tribes in the Andes, valuing their preservation is prevalent and uncontroversial [0]. Why not apply this same attitude to ourselves?
Both will inevitably be diluted through immigration. Culture is of course not static, even absent immigration, so "preserving" it has limited effectiveness. But perhaps you wish to see how your culture will grow and evolve, without mixing it with a different culture? Especially since culture, just like genes, is largely continuous - to simplify, if there are two countries with distinct cultures, there is probably a third country half-way between them that already has a mix of their cultures. In this sense, by importing cultures, you're not creating a "new" culture, you're just reducing cultural differences.
The same argument holds for genes, including the part about continuity [1]. It's popular to reduce this to skin color, but human genetic diversity covers far more. For example, all of the Big Five personality traits are hereditary [2], and likely so are other personality attributes that are harder to measure or define. Given how almost no variable human traits are evenly distributed among all groups, that means immigration quite literally changes the character of a country. Again, no invocation of "supremacy" is needed, just a desire for preservation. When this desire for preservation is directed externally, for example at Kashmir [3], it has no associated taboo.
[0] At least in the present. We are all aware how different attitudes used to be, with explicit efforts to colonize and "civilize" others, or destroying old cultures and identities to replace them with the New Soviet Man and Year Zero.
This is a lot to respond to here, so I won't be able to respond to all of these.
I didn't respond to valuing kin and culture since it wasn't clear what you meant by that. To be honest, it's still not totally clear - when you speak of culture being diluted, it sounds like you're talking about the influence that culture has on society as a whole? Or how many people in the society have that culture?
On the individual level, it seems like someone who grows up in a particular culture has that for life. People don't suddenly become Spanish, even if they live there from 30-50 years old. So in the course of your lifetime, your kin are still going to be there for you. But maybe you meant - if your kids don't have the same culture as yours. I don't totally understand why this would be a problem, unless they wanted to join some cult or something.
So if you meant preserving culture across generations, as you also mentioned, culture isn't static. Just look at how the culture of England changes from Tudor to Stuart, or from Victorian to Edwardian to modern era. You might say "Recent history is hard to compare to since influence from other countries has touched it and technology has changed so rapidly", but further back than that is not well documented, older histories written exclusively by government bureaucrats who have a specific view of culture. And even in recent histories - in those eras of England I mentioned - religions other than whatever was officially sanctioned at the time were violently held down, so even if you can say there was "A Culture" in England at the time, it was through violent force and fear of violent force that it was kept that way.
What's great about America is the ability to hold so many cultures and through democracy be pretty stable, but I don't know if there's ever been "an American culture". Even the founding story of America - escaping religious persecution - speaks to the horrors of enforcing cultural homogeny. What if, at Plymouth Rock, they met some Native American Nationalists? (Yeah of course there were some tribes of american inidians who attacked the colonists, and some who didn't) It's easy to blame changing culture on immigrants and outsiders because the world is opening up and so many people are moving around, but shifts happen within a single "culture", culture is not static even without an external force.
You speak of conflict, of efforts to colonize, and it's true that world history is almost constant warfare. We are currently in the third longest period of peace (and probably most peaceful)[0][1] in known history. We are also in the most accepting times of other cultures. You say that conflict happens across ethnic lines, but how can you explain the long period of peace happening during the time of most cultural cross pollination? The longest time of peace was the Pax Romana, when the Roman Empire explicitly let conquered nations keep their local cultures, and travel within the Empire was commonplace.
Do I want to preserve my culture through my kids? Yes. I teach them the importance of knowing where they came from. I bought books about my ancestor who was on the Mayflower and they're proud he was there for the first Thanksgiving. Mostly, I want them to be good people, and know that the older they get the less influence they will get from me, so I try to show them how to be empathetic, kind, strong willed, and when to know which to be, so no matter what beliefs they end up with they are coming at them from a good place.
And as for genes mirror geography - yeah - people didn't move around much before the airplane. It's pretty great that common people can travel the world. And as for personality traits being hereditary - I actually didn't know that and it's very interesting. I don't know how it relates to your overall argument, but biodiversity tends to be good for the whole ecosystem.
Because the kinds of people who want you to distinguish between the two are the kinds of people who lie in the middle of the venn diagram. Which, to be honest, if it's not a single overlapping circle, it's pretty darn close...
Nobody wants to have their own nation state dedicated to their race because they appreciate other cultures and want them to live on their own.
Find me the white nationalist who is not a white supremacist, and I will have them demonstrate being a white supremacist to you.
But wasn't that the original intent and promise of MDMA as a tool for therapy? That is, to help the individual be more introspective and unlock and unblock their baggage?
In other words, his change in beliefs is a symptom. The root trigger is he changed his view of himself after taking MDMA. It's a subtle but important distinction.
Considering how much conflict there is in the world at all sorts of different levels, the relative lack of interest in these tools is rather interesting.
The use of MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, etc in clinical settings is usually paired with clear and wholesome intention setting, and therapy work. The substance seems to be just one part of a set of processes.
It's easy to forget that after all, our brain is just a complex chemical machine. Introduce a new chemical into it, and everything about you can change. There is no abstract "self" inside. Our mind is just a function of our brain.
I used to believe that completely, until I got to experience my grandmother's Alzheimer's and Dementia. Nothing disproves the idea of a ever-lasting, metaphysical soul, like seeing it crumble before your eyes as various parts of brain decay and shut down.
I really hope that you never experience it yourself, and I respect your beliefs, but I'm convinced beyond a doubt that there is nothing in there that is not chemical.
Yes I have had elderly relatives fall apart. But you can certainly appreciate that I have thought about all of the big questions - bad things happening to good people, injustice, our body and mind decaying - and it doesn’t shake my faith.
Your soul isn’t a snapshot in time. Aborted fetuses or mentally challenged people also have souls and go to the afterlife. It’s beyond human comprehension but I have faith we leave this world behind and go beyond once we perish.
Even though I don't believe in the metaphysical, one could argue that the brain is just a tool helping the soul manifest itself physically and a broken brain is just bad at doing that.
Thought experiment: Take a remote control car. Damage the radio receiver or the chips that translate its signals into signals to the motors. Observe that this creates degraded performance (perhaps the car can only turn left now, not right). Does this disprove the idea that something operated the car other than those chips?
Where is the interface between the soul and the brain? How do they communicate? Why and how the chemical changes in the brain changes the character and psyche of a person if it comes from the incorruptible soul?
It absolutely does, it's just not as detailed as we have for how computers work....
Consciousness is in many ways an illusion, manifested as a result of complex chemical processes passed on from our predecessors and developed over the course of billions of years....
Just because you perceive yourself as having free will does not mean you actually do... See the recent post on this site about people getting convinced they committed a crime they not only were innocent of but had never even happened at all....
I don't think that's true; while it's obviously true that many mental processes can probably be explained away, something sits at the center of the mind that perceives things, and claiming that said awareness is a material or emergent property is a claim you can make, but it's a completely unsubstantiated one.
Neither life after death nor memories require the existence of an inherent self (see the Buddhism belief in karma, rebirth, and past-life recollection which coexist happily with the doctrine of no-self).
But you're right in that they depend on the mind being primary over the body.
Brain injuries proove that the brain is necessary to the mind at least as much as bones and muscles are necessary to movement.
This does not prove the non existence of an immortal soul† but proves that any effect metaphysical entities have on our observable (both inner and outer) behavior is heavily mediated by neurons.
† I mean this literally as I am not sure how to conceptualize the concept of existence for metaphysical entities
Also, even if the metaphysical soul existed, they needed to interface with the physical entities somehow. In other word, if the soul is in control of the brain, and thus requires some form of communication with the brain, which enters into the realm of physics.
Well we can all believe anything we want, but that doesn't change reality.
We are meat meacha controlled by pudding with rudimentary intelligence. This brings us great joy, especially when raising mini-mechs, but at the end of the day, we all end up rotting in the ground.
Doesn’t your own lived experience cause any doubts that we are just meat automaton?
Sure to an outside observer we can be just a pile of molecular reactions responding to outside stimulus, but doesn’t that fall short of explaining your own consciousness that you are experiencing?
But anyway, shouldn't it be considered good form to keep random unfalsifiable beliefs to oneself since they can't be part of a conversation on reality?
That's just a delusion people hold on to in order to avoid the existential crisis, dread and depression that often accompanies acceptance of the fact there's nothing "after".
It's literally just magical thinking, no different than believing you were created by the spaghetti Monster...
> She added that it's "mind-boggling" that the drug could potentially change someone's beliefs in the way it is thought to have done with Brendan.
> But in the case of Brendan, he had recently been exposed as a white supremacist and lost his job when he was enrolled in the study. He was full of regret about getting caught out.
> 30 minutes after taking the MDMA pill, Brendan questioned: "Why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" and wondered why he had jeopardized the relationships in his life.
Case study of one here, but MDMA can change your reference point for how you think about things that are connection related. He was already in crisis from losing his job and, likely, reputation. If I had to guess, Brendan realized humans are humans, and the future of humanity doesn't rely on abstract physical traits but on deeper things.
This is to say, I think they understand what many drug users do: the drug wasn't the difference; crisis was the difference and using the right tool led him out of that crisis. Think along the lines of, instead of this event being "the end" of Brendan (eg: losing his job and reputation) he now interprets it as a new beginning. The two discoveries together can chart a path forward.
The bit about the Taliban kind of reinforces this I think. Often the Taliban exploits people in crisis from my experience. They use the guiding during the drug to chart the user to a nationalist path.
> Nuwer pointed out that Brendan's "seemingly spontaneous change" appears to be an exception to the norm. MDMA releases the chemical oxytocin, which our bodies naturally produce. The chemical causes animals to fiercely love their own, but also protect them from others — which can mean a disdain for outsiders may actually increase.
I don't even know about this mess. Animals and humans are not the same when it comes to connection. Animals require domestication or some sort of symbiosis to cooperate while humans can do this with much more fluidity. I think this bit of data needlessly complicates what they observed with Brendan.
Future test recommendation: find a human in a moment of crisis (maybe need to be specific on what kinds) and administer a drug and therapy. Help them navigate said crisis and observe the results over the next 3 months, specifically in vectors of thought. You could even go as far as to map this progress to neurogenesis.
Presumably all therapeutic paths will start from salvaging his ruined life. Any basically functioning human would be doing the same in a moment of crisis. The key difference is what path he charts. If it's based on some profound discovery that makes all humans more relatable to him, then that's good. If it's based on a system of feigning the former then that's bad.
That's why I recommended what I did for a follow on study, because I didn't accept this as fact. Most of behavioral psychology, imo, is not fact based at this point.
But that’s clearly the utility being proposed. It disturbs me that a few feet from the Berkeley campus there are now five dispensaries. This is where they’re going. Let’s “fix” the “broken” people. Yesterday you had to put a bullet in them but now we can have them whistling the village tune and paying their taxes with a 50c pill.
Yes, won’t somebody think of the poor white supremacists who… come to reevaluate their belief systems after having a few moments of chemically-increased empathy?
The man didn’t forget who he was. Reading the article, it suddenly became painfully clear to him who he was, and he started to question why.
I’m quite certain that weed and MDMA aren’t quite the woke mind-control agents you seem to believe they are.
I’m sure they are and with a little tweaking and the right lighting they can almost certainly turn a liberal into a communist, or “have them see themselves more clearly and then rationally reevaluate their perspective”
> which investigated whether the drug could increase the pleasantness of human touch.
Why would they need a study for this? Literally every single person who has taken MDMA can confirm that increases the pleasantness of human touch. What a waste.
Every single person who’s taken DMT can confirm they’ve spoken to elder gods and aliens. Maybe we should be okay with scientists confirming things “everyone” knows.
I’m sure it is. But I’m not sure what that would look like.
Possibly someone who was a hardcore PETA activist type in a crisis of conscience in some small rural place given a second chance by someone who was racist.
This is admittedly a bizarre set of circumstances that would need to happen.
With psychedelics, you can wire your brain to believe whatever you want. Of course, if what you believe is at odds with your environment then you're bound to have trouble.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadHumans are blessed with a higher level of communication, there's no reason to abuse it. There's no good reason to be lazy. There's no good reason to take pride in negligence.
Step up. Lean in. Or for the sake of truth and justice, just shut up*. We've got enough noise to have to contend with fools who effectively don't know green from yellow.
* Not you, but the collective of people who believe Orwellian newspeak-y speak it ok.
p.s. Hating haters isn't exactly clean and consistent either. But that's another chat for another day.
"White nationalist" overlaps with and kinda implies "white supremacist".
After all, the idea that whites should dominate is kinda hard to explain or logically justify without introducing the concept of superiority.
I don't think this distinction is unclear.
In and of itself, a racial nationalist's beliefs might be something close to "I prefer to live in a country with my own people."
In and of itself, a racial supremacist's beliefs might be something close to "My people are inherently superior and should rule over others."
Anyway, I'm mainly just interested in this person's starting point and the effect that his trip had on him, as well as calling out the media for not being precise about these issues. Nationalist and Supremacist are not synonyms: that's lazy click-baiting journalism.
"White nationalists" are really just "supremacists" attempting (unsuccessfully) to avoid the negative implications.
Oppression of "non-whites" is implied by their stated objectives since it is the only realistic way to achieve them.
The pertinent fact is that immigrants are here now --- this is not just history or tradition, it is current reality.
Genocide would be an amoral effort to alter this existing reality and enforce "white nationalism" --- by those who obviously think skin color makes them "superior" in some way and grants them to right to oppress or even kill "other" immigrants.
Attempting to justify this by past genocide is an "appeal to tradition".
What about white flight and gentrification? As far as I'm aware, there are extensive legal and governmental measures in place in the US (such as placing low-income housing deliberately to decrease homogeneity [1]) to prevent people from ethnically self-sorting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Me_a_Hero
Now I am not from the US so I won't comment about history, and I can fully believe that there is some link between being a white nationalist and believing one "race" to be superior to the others, but I do not believe that this is a reason enough to disqualify the idea.
If there were some white nationalist group that espoused moving to predominantly white countries (or really starting their own country [0]), while being completely tolerant of the domestic state of affairs and distancing themselves from those who seek to turn this has-always-been-diverse country into their desired ethnostate, then perhaps the distinction would be relevant. But lacking that, it's a distinction without a difference.
[0] I don't know that there are any countries that are predominantly "white" but not better defined by a more specific term. It would seem that "white" nationalism is itself the product of "miscegenation" between various traditional nationalities. Nobody really balks at "$traditionally_white_nationality pride", or even larger pan- terms like European or Slavic pride. It's the attempt to take credit for nothing more than a lighter skin tone that is the problem.
No, it is not. Populations naturally evolve, but they never spontaneously evolve to whatever your arbitrary definition of pure white is. Nobody is orchestrating this, and "white" people (quotes because that's quite a moving target) aren't going extinct. Low birth rates aren't replacement, and unless you want to blame our standard of living, they aren't genocide either.
I guess it'd be a more interesting question if you asked who caused the upcoming global climate refugee crisis.
Supremacism in this context means wanting your group to have control in a multiethnic state. It’s not intrinsically tied to questions of inherent superiority or global domination. So not that different from nationalism.
Racial nationalism (e.g. white nationalism) is an ideology that advocates a racial definition of national identity.
In other words, it endows one chosen race of immigrants with special qualities and status that makes it "superior" to others. And this special quality of "superiority" (skin color) is not earned but rather gifted.
Sounds kinda racist to me.
Racism doesn't require a sense of superiority, but rather a preference for race(s). I'm not offended that I can't get citizenship in China. Do you think they think they're better than you?
Yes and Hitler obviously preferred aryans --- but there is obviously more to the story.
"White nationalism" is clearly not merely a statement of preference. It is the belief and objective that white people should dominate society. Why? On what basis? Because Jesus was white (he wasn't)?
"White nationalism" is not about superiority --- it is just a "preference" for oppressing others in order to achieve dominance. Thanks for the clarification/word play.
That was not a rhetorical question.
> Yes and Hitler obviously preferred aryans --- but there is obviously more to the story.
True. There are different levels of racism. Some are enough to maintain an ethnicity, and others go way beyond that.
> "White nationalism" is not about superiority --- it is just a "preference" for oppressing others in order to achieve dominance. Thanks for the clarification/word play.
Are Chinese nationalists oppressive because they don't just open the borders? It's clear that you have a different standard for white people.
No. Simply closing their border is not oppressive but just like in the US, it is not enough to produce an ethnocentric society.
It's clear that you have a different standard for white people.
No, the standard is the same. And to illustrate, you've picked a nearly perfect analog for US "white nationalists" with the Han Chinese.
What China is doing to the Uyghurs and what "white nationalists" in the US want for "non-whites" is oppression. This is the only way to achieve their ethnocentric objectives.
In both cases, the objective is built around ethnic superiority and is equally racist and reprehensible and amoral and inhumane.
> No. Simply closing their border is not oppressive but just like in the US, it is not enough to produce an ethnocentric society.
It's enough to maintain one.
> This is the only way to achieve their ethnocentric objectives.
In that part of China, sure.
> In both cases, the objective is built around ethnic superiority and is equally racist and reprehensible and amoral and inhumane.
Name one ethnicity that couldn't be construed as such. Respecting the rights of individuals is not how ethnicities are constructed. Liberalism destroys ethnicities, yet liberals have decided not to be evenhanded about it because it's not politically expedient. That's how you produce more intense forms of racism.
Because you value your kin and culture, and wish to preserve them. Or because you believe other people have in-group preference, which means your group will be worse off from increased competition. It's no different than a new pack of wolves moving into another pack's territory. From that point of view, the absence of self-superiority beliefs increases nationalism, since if the other group is equal or better, they are more competitively dangerous.
I don't think you need to see it as a zero sum game. Only that conflict, violent or otherwise, is likely, and often organized along ethnic lines.
We could look at history to try to assess how true that is, but that would be a boring debate. I'm more interested in your opinion of my first point, which you skipped: what if you value your kin and culture? When it comes to biodiversity, other species, or even obscure tribes in the Andes, valuing their preservation is prevalent and uncontroversial [0]. Why not apply this same attitude to ourselves?
Both will inevitably be diluted through immigration. Culture is of course not static, even absent immigration, so "preserving" it has limited effectiveness. But perhaps you wish to see how your culture will grow and evolve, without mixing it with a different culture? Especially since culture, just like genes, is largely continuous - to simplify, if there are two countries with distinct cultures, there is probably a third country half-way between them that already has a mix of their cultures. In this sense, by importing cultures, you're not creating a "new" culture, you're just reducing cultural differences.
The same argument holds for genes, including the part about continuity [1]. It's popular to reduce this to skin color, but human genetic diversity covers far more. For example, all of the Big Five personality traits are hereditary [2], and likely so are other personality attributes that are harder to measure or define. Given how almost no variable human traits are evenly distributed among all groups, that means immigration quite literally changes the character of a country. Again, no invocation of "supremacy" is needed, just a desire for preservation. When this desire for preservation is directed externally, for example at Kashmir [3], it has no associated taboo.
[0] At least in the present. We are all aware how different attitudes used to be, with explicit efforts to colonize and "civilize" others, or destroying old cultures and identities to replace them with the New Soviet Man and Year Zero.
[1] Genes mirror geography within Europe - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...
I didn't respond to valuing kin and culture since it wasn't clear what you meant by that. To be honest, it's still not totally clear - when you speak of culture being diluted, it sounds like you're talking about the influence that culture has on society as a whole? Or how many people in the society have that culture?
On the individual level, it seems like someone who grows up in a particular culture has that for life. People don't suddenly become Spanish, even if they live there from 30-50 years old. So in the course of your lifetime, your kin are still going to be there for you. But maybe you meant - if your kids don't have the same culture as yours. I don't totally understand why this would be a problem, unless they wanted to join some cult or something.
So if you meant preserving culture across generations, as you also mentioned, culture isn't static. Just look at how the culture of England changes from Tudor to Stuart, or from Victorian to Edwardian to modern era. You might say "Recent history is hard to compare to since influence from other countries has touched it and technology has changed so rapidly", but further back than that is not well documented, older histories written exclusively by government bureaucrats who have a specific view of culture. And even in recent histories - in those eras of England I mentioned - religions other than whatever was officially sanctioned at the time were violently held down, so even if you can say there was "A Culture" in England at the time, it was through violent force and fear of violent force that it was kept that way.
What's great about America is the ability to hold so many cultures and through democracy be pretty stable, but I don't know if there's ever been "an American culture". Even the founding story of America - escaping religious persecution - speaks to the horrors of enforcing cultural homogeny. What if, at Plymouth Rock, they met some Native American Nationalists? (Yeah of course there were some tribes of american inidians who attacked the colonists, and some who didn't) It's easy to blame changing culture on immigrants and outsiders because the world is opening up and so many people are moving around, but shifts happen within a single "culture", culture is not static even without an external force.
You speak of conflict, of efforts to colonize, and it's true that world history is almost constant warfare. We are currently in the third longest period of peace (and probably most peaceful)[0][1] in known history. We are also in the most accepting times of other cultures. You say that conflict happens across ethnic lines, but how can you explain the long period of peace happening during the time of most cultural cross pollination? The longest time of peace was the Pax Romana, when the Roman Empire explicitly let conquered nations keep their local cultures, and travel within the Empire was commonplace.
Do I want to preserve my culture through my kids? Yes. I teach them the importance of knowing where they came from. I bought books about my ancestor who was on the Mayflower and they're proud he was there for the first Thanksgiving. Mostly, I want them to be good people, and know that the older they get the less influence they will get from me, so I try to show them how to be empathetic, kind, strong willed, and when to know which to be, so no matter what beliefs they end up with they are coming at them from a good place.
And as for genes mirror geography - yeah - people didn't move around much before the airplane. It's pretty great that common people can travel the world. And as for personality traits being hereditary - I actually didn't know that and it's very interesting. I don't know how it relates to your overall argument, but biodiversity tends to be good for the whole ecosystem.
[0] xracy ↗ Because the kinds of people who want you to distinguish between the two are the kinds of people who lie in the middle of the venn diagram. Which, to be honest, if it's not a single overlapping circle, it's pretty darn close...
Nobody wants to have their own nation state dedicated to their race because they appreciate other cultures and want them to live on their own.
Find me the white nationalist who is not a white supremacist, and I will have them demonstrate being a white supremacist to you.
In other words, his change in beliefs is a symptom. The root trigger is he changed his view of himself after taking MDMA. It's a subtle but important distinction.
And yet, I bet most of these people consider themselves both smart, and concerned about ~all important matters.
> MDMA has, for instance, been used by the Taliban to channel connection to the divine during prayer chants, according to Nuwer.
Indeed, it would be very surprising if a drug consistently made its users' beliefs more accurate.
Nothing says "it doesn't work consistently" like MK-Ultra!
I really hope that you never experience it yourself, and I respect your beliefs, but I'm convinced beyond a doubt that there is nothing in there that is not chemical.
When someone’s metaphysical soul passes on, what snapshot in time are someone’s memories plucked from their Alzheimer’s-riddled brain?
But you worded it in a way that placates the insanity and undermines any value of discourse.
We don't get to Truth by saying "Whatever you feel like believing is fine"....
Consciousness is in many ways an illusion, manifested as a result of complex chemical processes passed on from our predecessors and developed over the course of billions of years....
Just because you perceive yourself as having free will does not mean you actually do... See the recent post on this site about people getting convinced they committed a crime they not only were innocent of but had never even happened at all....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
But you're right in that they depend on the mind being primary over the body.
This does not prove the non existence of an immortal soul† but proves that any effect metaphysical entities have on our observable (both inner and outer) behavior is heavily mediated by neurons.
† I mean this literally as I am not sure how to conceptualize the concept of existence for metaphysical entities
We are meat meacha controlled by pudding with rudimentary intelligence. This brings us great joy, especially when raising mini-mechs, but at the end of the day, we all end up rotting in the ground.
Sure to an outside observer we can be just a pile of molecular reactions responding to outside stimulus, but doesn’t that fall short of explaining your own consciousness that you are experiencing?
Just because you can explain things simply doesn’t mean it’s a complete description. “Simple” mechanisms give rise to complex behaviors.
But anyway, shouldn't it be considered good form to keep random unfalsifiable beliefs to oneself since they can't be part of a conversation on reality?
It's literally just magical thinking, no different than believing you were created by the spaghetti Monster...
> But in the case of Brendan, he had recently been exposed as a white supremacist and lost his job when he was enrolled in the study. He was full of regret about getting caught out.
> 30 minutes after taking the MDMA pill, Brendan questioned: "Why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" and wondered why he had jeopardized the relationships in his life.
Case study of one here, but MDMA can change your reference point for how you think about things that are connection related. He was already in crisis from losing his job and, likely, reputation. If I had to guess, Brendan realized humans are humans, and the future of humanity doesn't rely on abstract physical traits but on deeper things.
This is to say, I think they understand what many drug users do: the drug wasn't the difference; crisis was the difference and using the right tool led him out of that crisis. Think along the lines of, instead of this event being "the end" of Brendan (eg: losing his job and reputation) he now interprets it as a new beginning. The two discoveries together can chart a path forward.
The bit about the Taliban kind of reinforces this I think. Often the Taliban exploits people in crisis from my experience. They use the guiding during the drug to chart the user to a nationalist path.
> Nuwer pointed out that Brendan's "seemingly spontaneous change" appears to be an exception to the norm. MDMA releases the chemical oxytocin, which our bodies naturally produce. The chemical causes animals to fiercely love their own, but also protect them from others — which can mean a disdain for outsiders may actually increase.
I don't even know about this mess. Animals and humans are not the same when it comes to connection. Animals require domestication or some sort of symbiosis to cooperate while humans can do this with much more fluidity. I think this bit of data needlessly complicates what they observed with Brendan.
Future test recommendation: find a human in a moment of crisis (maybe need to be specific on what kinds) and administer a drug and therapy. Help them navigate said crisis and observe the results over the next 3 months, specifically in vectors of thought. You could even go as far as to map this progress to neurogenesis.
That's why I recommended what I did for a follow on study, because I didn't accept this as fact. Most of behavioral psychology, imo, is not fact based at this point.
Giving someone a mind altering drug in order to manipulate their political beliefs is brainwashing and totally unethical.
This guy forgot who he was.
"Giving someone a mind altering drug in order to manipulate their political beliefs is brainwashing"
Second sentence of the article.
The man didn’t forget who he was. Reading the article, it suddenly became painfully clear to him who he was, and he started to question why.
I’m quite certain that weed and MDMA aren’t quite the woke mind-control agents you seem to believe they are.
Why would they need a study for this? Literally every single person who has taken MDMA can confirm that increases the pleasantness of human touch. What a waste.
LOL
Possibly someone who was a hardcore PETA activist type in a crisis of conscience in some small rural place given a second chance by someone who was racist.
This is admittedly a bizarre set of circumstances that would need to happen.