rbelivb

The nation-state model has historically been the dominant framework for organising collective life - it has shaped everything from education and economic systems to notions of citizenship, ethnicity, and social norms. But as more and more of our interactions and experiences move online, the physical and ideological boundaries of the nation-state start to break down. Education, commerce, community-building, and identity formation increasingly happen in deterritorialised digital spaces that transcend local contexts. This decoupling of social institutions from physical location calls into question many of the basic assumptions and power structures underpinning the nation-state. In this light, the mainstreaming of transgender identity can be seen as just one manifestation of a much broader cultural shift towards individualisation and self-determination in a post-national world. When traditional anchors of identity like local community, ethnicity, and nationhood lose their taken-for-granted status, individuals have more leeway to define themselves on their own terms. Core coordinates like currency, taxation, and labor rhythms evolved to manage collective life within the bounded space of the nation-state, but they struggle to map onto the fluid, borderless terrain of the internet.

Discourse which attempts to acknowledge the historical diversity of gender expressions across cultures often misses the fact that there is something qualitatively different about the way identity is being reconfigured in the digital age. It's not just about greater visibility or acceptance of previously marginalised identities, but a more fundamental rewiring of the very foundations of personal and collective identity. The question then becomes, what new forms of social, economic, and political organisation will emerge to replace the declining nation-state system? How will we construct meaning, belonging, and accountability in a world where identity is increasingly self-elected and untethered from place?

In my opinion, too many controversial users on this site have been banned, leading to an overall reduction in activity here. Users like PolytheistWitch, or far right users like Mesmer, may have been odious to some, but such a diversity of views is essential to this site. In my opinion, this site cannot be interesting without a healthy contingent of extremely unpleasant people on it. Personally, I would advocate that the policy on banning should be skewed much further in a liberal, laissez-faire direction.

The idea that Margaret Sanger was a racist white supremacist who wanted to use abortion to wipe out the "inferior" races is a common refrain of the conservative opponents of abortion. However, closer investigation shows that the situation is more complex. In fact, Sanger saw herself as a proponent of "eugenics" - but in a broader sense of eugenics as the genetic improvement of the human race. This is an idea which certainly deserves criticism, but there is a difference between this kind of eugenics, and white supremacy. In fact, Sanger saw her project as helping the black communities, and wanted to communicate the benefits to them. She did not see the promotion of abortion in black communities as an attempt to wipe them out, but instead wanted to work with black leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois to help "a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a 'caste' system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life."

The attempt to simply project conservative ideas about abortion as harming the demographics of a group, and the connotations of "eugenics" as inherently racist, in order to paint Sanger as a "third rail" untouchable figure, is a genuine example of the "cancel culture" which conservatives claim to oppose.

From what I remember of debate.org, there was an abundance of anarcho-communists, progressives and generally leftists on the site.

Today, on DART it seems like the dynamic has changed, so that mostly it's Trump supporters, anti-woke people, etc. talking about cancel culture or whatever, and then a handful of center-left liberals.

Why has the balance changed so much?

If someone asked me to call them by the pronoun "she / her" - although they were born as a male - I can agree to this purely as a matter of social convention. I do not need to believe that this person is "really" female or "really" male. In other words, just because I use female pronouns to refer to this person, it doesn't necessarily imply anything in terms of my beliefs about their chromosomes. Conservatives may not happen to like this social convention, and prefer that pronouns used in conversation always mapped onto biology or the gender assigned at birth. However, the fact that progressives disagree, in no way implies that they are confused about the science of biology. And, to argue that this convention should be generally accepted, is not to deny the biology of sex differences. I bring this up because it is a fact that is almost universally misunderstood or misconstrued by conservatives when talking about the issue.

The Bitcoin white paper describes it as a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash."

However, many argue now that it is an asset rather than a currency, largely due to the volatility of its price. Cryptocurrency in general, has struggled to find a genuine use case outside of speculative investment. NFTs can be seen as signifiers of status or luxury items, but this is far from settling the question of their inherent value. Many also pin their hopes to crypto gaming, yet the games themselves have yet to be developed, and it is not clear how the presence of NFTs will enhance the actual gameplay - it remains for crypto gaming to develop games that anyone actually wants to play for their quality as games. Another development is decentralized finance, which seems to simply be a rotating of funds between assets and functions essentially as a ponzi scheme. It raises the question, what is the genuine use case for cryptocurrencies, and will their main appeal always be as a vehicle for risky, yet profitable speculative investments?

Debates about things like CRT are only grasping at secondary phenomena. For example, the debates about whether the US is fundamentally based upon oppression, slavery or racism. Whether the disparities between various demographics are natural, or cultural - equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. These debates can never be resolved, because both sides hold an assumption in common. The very idea of "merit" or "competence" is really a measure of one's propensity to rise to the top of a system of social cohesion whose centre is really maintained by the stability of the nation-state form. What is supposed as "natural" is really the nation-state form, which is supposed as historically immutable. In fact, in the scale of historical time it is relatively recent, and the circle of social structures organised in its image is already quickly receding. Within a few hundred years, the idea that humanity organised its economic systems by bundling groups of people according to hereditary lineages will be a distant memory, and new methods of determining social cohesion will have been formulated. When we ask if various problems are caused by nature, by culture, or by "neoliberalism" or "capitalism" - really these are the problems of an age of transition. The nation-state as the organising principle of geopolitics is breaking up, and is slowly being replaced by a new paradigm. The breakup of the concept of the nation-state will be the deconstruction of the very concepts of race, gender, and class. These tendencies cannot be pinned to any conspiracy of revolutionary college students, greedy capitalists, or any other group - it is a tendency inherent in our social structures, and the attempt to circumvent or avoid it requires increasingly extreme measures, since it is against the fundamental tendency of progress.

If given the choice to:

It is better in my opinion to even out the gap rather than increasing the absolute level.

Even if someone's absolute level of comfort is quite high, their life will feel meaningless if they have no influence socially.

What do you think?

If you had to choose only one of these outcomes, which would you pick?

On the one hand, many progressives claim to value open immigration, but I wonder what they would choose if increased immigration meant more pressure on the welfare state.

On the other hand, many conservatives claim to value the free market and the exchange of ideas, but advocate social policies which would further isolate distinct social groups based upon ethnicity, which seems antithetical to an open market.