Asymmetrical Multiculturalism - Or 'identity politics for me, but not for thee'

[Sprig of Parsley]

No, it doesn't. Door 1 is false. It goes back to the drunk/scholar dad example. If you are from an underachieving demographic, you should be ashamed of part of your history and you should seek to make changes. China is a good example that started making economic changes away from their communist ideas that they had adopted and let to stagnation and adopting some free market principles to start to do better. An example of a country that is refusing to make changes is Pakistan in relation to consaguinity; they have the highest rate of consanguinity in the world, shamelessly. After all if it was good enough for the prophet, it's good enough for them. It's causing an ever increase in birth complications.

You should be ashamed of the part of your history that is underachieving and yes, that means that some shame for brutalities can be appropriate as long as you don't let it dominate (like the scholar dad coming home drunk twice and being a bit of an ass). You have to keep things in perspective of course.

Door 2 is a false proposition as well. If I'm from a chinese family that knows the secret of making silk, yes, I only know that because I was born in the right family, but I still had to learn how to make it and guard its secret. The choice to follow in the footsteps still have to made and the sacrifices and effort to learn that. This means the personal choice isn't meaningless, even if you had the advantage of having good parents who passed it on to you.

It really boggles my mind that you would find it unpleasant for people to be connected to previous generations and groups larger than 1.

Because it keeps leading back to those doors. It keeps fucking happening, and when it does I want to pick up that cudgel of collectivism and beat them all about the head with it and ask them if they still love that shit when it's hurting them in particular.

I follow aristotle's thinking in the sense that a virtue is a balance between two things and the extremes are vices. If you want to go as far as possible into individualism I consider that as much as a threat as someone that wants to go as far into collectivization as possible. Why do you presume there would be no possibility of balance between the two?

Have you never experienced being part of a group effort? Of being responsible for something collectively, even if it's a group of 5 or 6, where you can't say "I OWN THIS", but only "WE DID THIS"?

Let's just say group projects of pretty much any size are magnets for do-nothings and free-riders who will happily drag other members under given the opportunity, rather than put in anything of worth themselves. I loathe working with people for this reason. I also want to reduce the variables in the equation to a bare fucking minimum to ensure that when problems arise I can determine their nature and correct course if necessary. I don't trust any given Tom, Dick or Harry to A. not fuck up and B. not obfuscate their fuck-ups in order to save face. I have seen it happen and I'm sick of dealing with it in situations where it's not ABSOLUTELY necessary.

Group efforts are great right up until the point they turn into quagmires of nepotism/favoritism, bullshitting and free-riding.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Because it keeps leading back to those doors. It keeps fucking happening, and when it does I want to pick up that cudgel of collectivism and beat them all about the head with it and ask them if they still love that shit when it's hurting them in particular.

You assert it again, without a why. Tell me what was wrong with my examples or prove why it can only lead to exactly those doors.

 

[Vitoze]

You assert it again, without a why. Tell me what was wrong with my examples or prove why it can only lead to exactly those doors.

give him a break he mistook the local heer avatar guy for an SS larper.

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

You assert it again, without a why. Tell me what was wrong with my examples or prove why it can only lead to exactly those doors.

I've never NOT seen it lead to those doors. Everything from arguments that the leaps and bounds made by what is now referred to collectively as The West in everything from medicine to technology to philosophy etc. only came about because the White Europeans pilfered every other culture on the face of the planet and gave Europe an unfair leg up, to arguments that this same pilfering is why Africans are so stunted in every conceivable way and unironic "THEY WUZ KANGS" shit being bandied about for every single melanin-enriched individual ever. That kind of shit is how white guilt is fostered, how money from The West is being funneled into pits in the third world to enrich warlords and kingpins, how any sort of great stride forward by a person who happens to have a lighter complexion is being demeaned as unimportant or actively harmful/stolen from a more deserving Pee Oh See, how the works of the masters are being derided as "more shit dead white men wrote".

Collectivism is both poison and keeps becoming even more potent poison, time and time again. "Maybe just a little poison won't hurt, maybe just a drop."

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

I've never NOT seen it lead to those doors. Everything from arguments that the leaps and bounds made by what is now referred to collectively as The West in everything from medicine to technology to philosophy etc. only came about because the White Europeans pilfered every other culture on the face of the planet and gave Europe an unfair leg up, to arguments that this same pilfering is why Africans are so stunted in every conceivable way and unironic "THEY WUZ KANGS" shit being bandied about for every single melanin-enriched individual ever. That kind of shit is how white guilt is fostered, how money from The West is being funneled into pits in the third world to enrich warlords and kingpins, how any sort of great stride forward by a person who happens to have a lighter complexion is being demeaned as unimportant or actively harmful/stolen from a more deserving Pee Oh See, how the works of the masters are being derided as "more shit dead white men wrote".

Collectivism is both poison and keeps becoming even more potent poison, time and time again. "Maybe just a little poison won't hurt, maybe just a drop."

Uh. I hate to break this to you, but it was Democracy and the Enlightenment that opened this door to overthrowing the Ancien Regimes, which in turn paved the way for Communism. Capitalism and Communism are just two sides of the same materialist coin.

 

[Lemmingwise]

I've never NOT seen it lead to those doors.

I've read your post three times but there doesn't seem to be any reasoning or agument beyond this sentence. Simply more assertion. I suppose if you approach everything highly atomized it would make sense to say "I have only ever seen it this way". From a highly individualistic perspective, that would be sufficient evidence. You know it, so it must be true. You've seen it.

Without groups, including the group that built the internet, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation in the first place. The amount of money and effort put into that (including government funding; another type of collective), it would never have been possible. Should we be ashamed of using the internet, of standing on the shoulders of gians? I think that alone shows that not all collectivism is poison.

Maybe, and I say this with empathy and with full understanding that it would be a hard place to be, the reason why you don't like to work in groups is because you don't have the skills to keep other accountable/effective and end up being taken advantage of. That is then enlarged and projected onto all group/collective efforts. And I can see why it's threatening. You can be the most skilled, capable and responsible individual, but a group of average joes will be able to take you down; politically, professionally, physically and in other arena's too. Is it possible that your personal bad experiences with being part of group efforts (and perhaps I was wrong in blaming your people skills, it might as well be being surrounded by vultures) has soured you towards the ideas of groups a good avenue to do good things and to do so effectively?

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Uh. I hate to break this to you, but it was Democracy and the Enlightenment that opened this door to overthrowing the Ancien Regimes, which in turn paved the way for Communism. Capitalism and Communism are just two sides of the same materialist coin.

My beef is with collectivism, not materialism.

 

[Vitoze]

My beef is with collectivism, not materialism.

Good luck with the political norms of human societies prior to the enlightenment then, I suppose.

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

I'd say the crucial reason for the apparent asymmetry has very little to do with the acceptability of ethnic pride and solidarity in and of itself, and much more to do with it's context and authenticity.

When minority groups such as blacks, LGBTs, Native Americans, etc, come together to express black pride, gay pride, and Native American pride respectively, they're generally doing so as a display of collective solidarity against a historical backdrop of oppression. They're not doing it to celebrate their people's achievements in some belligerent display of ethnic chauvinism, they're doing it to mark their people's historical struggle for justice and humanity. Whether you happen to approve of this sort of thing or not, the context here is very different to the one in which 'white pride' is typically understood: it lacks the associations with ethnic supremacy or subjugation.

To illustrate this further: when white people come together to engage in the kind of ethnic pride I've elucidated above, no reasonable person has a problem with it (see: Irish pride). Conversely, when minority groups come together to engage in overt displays of xenophobia and supremacism (see: Black Hebrew Israelites), they're typically derided as disreputable bigots. This isn't to say that double standards don't exist, but they're nowhere near as pronounced as some people seem to be making out here.

 

[Lemmingwise]

To illustrate this further: when white people come together to engage in the kind of ethnic pride I've elucidated above, no reasonable person has a problem with it (see: Irish pride). Conversely, when minority groups come together to engage in overt displays of xenophobia and supremacism (see: Black Hebrew Israelites), they're typically derided as disreputable bigots. This isn't to say that double standards don't exist, but they're nowhere near as pronounced as some people seem to be making out here.

I get that americans think this, but as soon as that kind of thing happens in europe it's regarded as every bit as problematic. Case in point, when the english defense league did their absolute hardest at keeping neonazi's out, up to including actively barring them from joining protest parades and carrying signs with symbols of garbage bins and swastika's being thrown into them.

This was regarded as every bit as problematic, racist and nazi-like, by press, left-wing politicians, part of the public alike.

When there are these kind of ethnic unity groups that would have a chance of success of uniting people, that's when they're attacked under the assumption that they have genocidal intentions. I think the reason why in america specific ethnicity celebration like irish (assuming that's acceptable in the US as you say), is because there is no risk of uniting them and resist growing levels of multiculturalism.

ps. "No reasonable person" = No true scotsman fallacy.