General Politics Thread

You mean act and think out of a sincere love for strangers, and see where it leads you?

That's a thing of attitude and personality, not really anything that works beyond personal niceness. I mean, it works as a individual guideline, but if you want to appeal to a large crowd, you need more stuff

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 22nd 2019 at 9:17:53 AM

Specifically, it only really works in small groups. At least, small enough so that you can actually recognize everyone in the group by name and face and actually see them as real people. Dunbar's Number, essentially.

Edited by M84 on Aug 22nd 2019 at 10:21:45 PM

People that really will try to help everyone is weird, really weird to find.

Said this. I find Protagonist' view of Creating a New Social Tradition is pretty interesting, a sort of contrast to the classical "Smash Tradition and be free!!" method of dealing with Bigotry.

Like, Right Wingers are gonna need a massive re-alignment. Focus on certain issues and try to adapt. A lot of the Right Wing was created to preserve things from the Past and try to slow change.

However, it's more than clear that while they arguably might have won the Economic war, the Cultural war hasn't being nothing but defeat after defeat for the Right.

If Traditionalists want to stand a chance of surviving and not being a joke at best, they have to accept that the past wouldn't come back and that Society is being restructurated in a way where everything would be uncertain

This is gonna be extremely hard.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 22nd 2019 at 9:42:21 AM

Depends on what you mean. If you want an objective baseline change in average human behavior, ideology and belief itself is probably insufficient, regardless of the content. If rather you are looking for a new values system that people could self-identify with, providing a sense of unity, but only an indirect impact on behavior, then a more "Agape-based" form of Christianity could work.

I am wondering about the latter tho.

The idea of a controlled worldwide psychological change is pretty interesting, but I don't think it's gonna happen for now (maybe when we're old and we start ranting about how that's so evil and disgusting while our grandons are legit considering it).

I look forward for the days where even the most progressive of us end up looking like a raging reactionary to their descendents

The thing about 'tradition' is that almost by definition, that term means 'Things we continue to do regularly even though the original reason for doing it is no longer there'. Pretty much all traditions are, ultimately, unproductive. I don't mean that they can't serve a purpose, most commonly traditions give a sense of unity or connection to the past to the cultures or communities that practice them. I mean that this purpose can also be achieved through other means.

Keeping benign traditions aren't is pretty much always fine, but there's never a good reason to keep harmful ones around, nor is there ever a good reason to try to intentionally create new traditions.

Traditions are cultural memes and like all memes, you never know what's going to end up getting adopted and spread and what withers and dies and trying to force new traditions doesn't work.

While the same effects of a tradition of any kind can be archieved with other means...those will eventually become a tradition with any other name. Effectively creating new ones de facto.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 23rd 2019 at 8:12:52 AM

Oh look, ThoughtSlime did a video that explains the most common anarchist view of liberalism, using Twitch streamer Destiny as an example.

A conservative would reply that traditions are the result of generations of trial and error, and therefore must serve some sort of beneficial purpose, at least to the people who practice them, in order to have survived. Often, we forget what the alternatives and their costs were, and therefore no longer remember why our traditions survived in the first place, but they must be doing something right. You change such things at risk of unintended consequences. Or at least that's what Edmund Burke would say.

Which is nonsense. Most traditions, particularly the more problematic ones, are the result of the pressures of Kyriarchy, not necessity.

Relatively benign example (that's actually less benign in origin):

Why do US Senators and Congressmen often wear business suits during public functions?
Because it's tradition.

So how did it become tradition to wear that kind of fancy formal attire during public functions?
Because back way back when the States were still the Colonies you'd occasionally get working class and lower middle class people elected to local representation and all the wealthy people who made up the majority of representatives decided to mirror the House of Lords and the House of Commons back home and started dressing in their most expensive shit during any function where they'd be seen with other members in order to shame and Other the minority who couldn't afford that kind of finery.

Does the tradition hurt anyone?
Kinda, but practically: Nor really. After a couple decades, the tradition morphed from wearing your nicest shit to wearing a business suit and business suits are no longer so prohibitively expensive that buying a nice one means going hungry for a couple of months.

So is it worth keeping around?
No. It still involves expecting people to wear a certain thing in order to fit in and shaming them if they don't.

I don't think expecting people to wear certain things is a bad thing.

Especially not when we're talking about officials in the government, professional standards are in no way harmful.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 23rd 2019 at 2:32:10 AM

Traditions and aspects of culture are the result of a culture adapting to its environment. A better example, though, would be language. It's ok for language to evolve slowly, but if it evolves and splits too rapidly it becomes meaningless.

In my specific ideology, though, it's less that traditions themselves are good, and more that "public cultural involvement" is good as a tool of social engineering.

With expecting people to wear things: It makes sense. If someone can't be bothered to dress appropriately for an important position, then they can't bothered to do their job well. Actually this is a pretty example of what I'm talking about. I want people to pursue some degree of expectations, I don't want them to just live aimlessly.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Aug 23rd 2019 at 2:43:39 AM

Here's a better auestion: why is male vs female formal wear different? Good, neutral, or harmful?

@De Marquis That is a better question. That one I actually do consider a bit arbitrary and not especially important. Though I would make the argument that, from an aesthetic standpoint, clothes that look nice on a woman or a man do not necessarily look as nice on the reverse.

Mind you, I am a little cynical of women's fashion in some cases, as women's clothes sometimes appear impractical to me (high heels, for example). However, women keep choosing to wear them, and it's not really my place to tell them not to.

Except, of course, that enforcing a dress code not representative of what the average person wears on people whose entire damn job is to be representative of the average person is, you know, stupid.

Though to be fair, forcing people who are supposed to be representatives of the working class to dress up in the costume of the moneyed upper crust and justifying it as a kind of ideological purity test does do a good job at showing who the true masters are.

Edited by Robrecht on Aug 23rd 2019 at 11:58:48 AM

Representatives are supposed to represent our interests, that does not mean they have to be identical to us. Or look like us.

I'd prefer Representatives to look and act like the professionals I think they're supposed to be, looking like the average joe is neither necessary nor particularly beneficial.

So no, there is nothing stupid about Representatives dressing professionally.

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Robrecht's original post did not have the ultimate point that dress codes were bad. At least, it wasn't the most important point being made.

Umm, their post ended with "So is it worth keeping around? No. It still involves expecting people to wear a certain thing in order to fit in and shaming them if they don't."

So, they absolutely believe it should be removed.

On the rest, if I disagreed with their overall point I would've responded to it.

As for dressing a certain way for politicians, there is still the argument that it's meant to show that they actually take the job seriously. And it should be noted that the average citizen is expected to dress for their job. You don't go to a job interview wearing pajamas.

Two other things to note:

-It's not really that much of a burden on a politician.

-Also, politicians often do strategically dress to resemble the average citizen-and even spend a lot of resources doing so. In fact, politicians are kind of the poster child for "spending an hour making yourself look like you didn't spend any time at all getting dressed".

This screed against the business suit might be the weirdest flex on this thread.

The business suits are the attire of choice the businessman and the politician, the two parts of the bourgeois with the most power, is it really that weird?

We call it a POWER suit for a reason.

I wasn't being fully serious (but also kinda deadly serious) on that second paragraph.

Seriously though, the association of the suit and tie, a fashion style derived from a desire to display one's wealth and power by intentionally wearing useless things, with professionalism and commitment is one of the most clear examples of how Kyriarchy seeps into even the most mundane elements of society.

I agree about the differences between female and male dress codes - in both ways. A full business suit for men must be very hot in the summer even if you loosen the necktie and drop the coat/jacket part, the skirts for women is cold and unreasonable in a lot of the word in winter, and the less spoken about demanding high heels instead of "just pick a business-like shoe, you know, not tacky and not a sneaker/sports shoe or a flip-flop" the better. (I myself find high heels cumbersome and never learnt to walk in them but I do realize many people like them and like wearing them too.)