a thing that genuinely disgusts me are politicians who arent proud of the nations they serve
they lack the courage of their convictions, their people can Tell, and their ultimately fall will be shameful
was yelling about this with @selentelechia, I dont recall how we got on the topic but it may have been world war one via tolkien via anti-aging via socialism destroying womens ability to have a fulfilling life outside of the marketplace
she identified the british specifically as people who seem embarrassed to have been an empire at one point and are now basically a backwater
which you know what fucking get over it
you bastards are the heirs of Elizabeth and Pitt and you should act like it
And America! Good God!
Washington sat in that chair! Or one like it, modulo that snafu in 1812. Jefferson! Generations of Adams! Lincoln!
A ragtag army drunk on liberty defeated the most powerful empire on earth to birth this country and you can't spare a moment to take pride in inheriting the system they built with pen and sinew and blood?
one should be proud to participate in the continuation of great deeds of the past and aspire to become worthy of it by building on the work of one's forebears
the reason that nerds are unhappy about trump firing federal reserve people isnt because they particularly like those specific people
issue is that it makes the fed look beholden to the executive and this is a very bad outcome for economic stability
the fed hasnt covered itself in glory lately for sure but the counterfactual where its progressively and openly politicized is pretty much just a world of hyperinflation and impoverishment because thats a side effect of how unstable governments use politicized central banks
i think a steelman for "end the fed" is that we've left this absurdly powerful yet nigh defenseless institution sitting in plain sight like a loaded gun during a period of immensely high trust and as that period comes to a close someone is gonna make a first grab at the pistol
ok finally discovered a kind of lore i want to know about in a non clickbait way:
what one-shotted you?
eg for me it was 90s movies about how having a career and a house in the burbs is the worst thing that can ever happen to someone
i didn't realize i'd been Had until my 30s
everyone will give boomers and millennials shit about the social justice and narcissism, and rightly so. but the motherfuckers who tricked me into nearly ruining my life are genx
for those of you not familiar getting one shotted is getting wrecked on first contact with something. classic deployment attached
"everyone is the same and nations are fake" is the core dogma of the mid-late 20C liberalism that grew out of the war era. in the years since it's become a mostly-unstated and broadly-unassailable assumption of imperial policy
regrettably it is also disastrously incorrect
the history of this idea is worth studying. you can see the modern notion start to emerge in the progressive era and out of socialist thought, and gain some traction with (eg) the league of nations
ideologues might say that league failed bc it wasn't REAL world government
among socialism-inclined intellectuals, which is to say nearly all intellectuals until molotov-ribbentrop broke some out of their reveries, ww1 was understood to be a failure _caused by_ national identity
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being
you can get support for fargroups in time limited cases. there's a long history of (eg) american assistance for people on the other side of the world in disaster recovery
but duration breeds resentment, and organized charity is very hard to maintain with this sentiment
when you're talking about an outgroup for whom that resentment is ingrained and continuously salient, forget it
"multiculturalism" kills welfare states in the long run
amusingly this was one reason some of the more libertarian neoliberals supported open borders
i was disappointed that liberals did nothing in the face of the awokening. but that can at least be explained as cowardess
what's worse is that the awokening is over, they're not taking the fact that the awokening occurred as a serious problem to be guarded against going forward
one is left with the impression that either they are fine with everything that happened or they learned absolutely nothing from the experience. both of these possibilities seem disqualifying
what is the point of liberals who can't be bothered to care for liberty, one wonders