The Centre Party recently came up with a new platform after consultation with 10,000 party members. It's a platform which combines both the "small state/free market" aspect of right liberalism, with a liberal emphasis on individual autonomy.
And so the new platform includes a flat tax and the abolition of inheritance tax, combined with a proposal for free immigration and the legalisation of polygamy.
By free immigration is meant something very close to open borders. Prospective immigrants would not need to satisfy any criteria relating to education or employment:
In late 2012, the party began opposing all limits on immigration, such as the requirement for some degree of job skills and a clean criminal record. It supports a plan that would see Sweden's population quadrupled to 40 million inhabitants.
The party justified this policy as part of a commitment to freedom and equal rights:
The Centre Party seeks open borders, free movement and a generous refugee policy. For a party that protects freedom and builds its values on the equal rights there is no other logical position than that one is for a free immigration.But they also want cheap labour:
He stresses that the new, generous immigration policies must be combined with a new labor policy.The new part platform also includes the legalising of polygamy. The current leader of the Centre Party, Annie Lööf, came out in support of polygamy in 2006 when she was vice chair of the party's youth wing. The reason she gave for supporting polygamy is the standard liberal one:
Crucial elements are C-proposals on flexible priority rules and lower wages for those who are new to the labor market.
"I think most people would choose to get a job that paid less than going into isolation for ten years.
...It is many times better quality of life to have a job in Sweden compared with living in poverty or on the run somewhere else. That's how you should think."
"I don't think the state and laws should determine who and with whom my neighbours or I want to live," she wrote in a blog post at the time, according to SR.
"If my neighbour wants to marry two men, I wouldn't move or care. That's his or her choice."
All that matters to a liberal like Annie Lööf is that we maximise our autonomy, understood to mean our power to be self-determining individuals. What's missing is a concern for the nature of marriage itself and the longer-term effects on both the individual and society of changing from monogamous marriage to polygamy.
What's missing too is a sense that when it comes to relationships, we aren't free to choose in any direction. We can only choose within the culture of relationships that exists in society. If, for instance, a culture of polygamy is established, then inevitably there are going to be some men who will miss out on marriage whether they have chosen this or not, and some women who will find themselves with a choice of either having to share a husband or else leave a marriage. Polygamous culture, too, often involves older men with resources marrying much younger women, and women being cordoned off from the relatively large group of unmarried younger men.
If you want to marry well you have to be protective of the culture of relationships in society rather than focusing on autonomy alone.
The proposal to legalise polygamy is being resisted by sections of the Centre Party. It might not get through, but the proposal itself shows the direction that liberal principles are taking the party. If you sincerely believe that people should be free to marry whoever they choose, because individual autonomy trumps everything and because it would violate "equal rights" to deny this choice, then it's difficult to see on what principled basis polygamy will continue to be rejected.
In this case, I don't think it's really about autonomy. It's about placating their most dangerous immigrant population: Muslims. You know, the people the Swedes stupidly believe will treat them well when they finally control Sweden. Morons. The Copts are their future.
ReplyDeleteYou would think they were referring about to Muslims. Of course the swedes can't question what "others" do with their lives and anything a woman does is her choice.
ReplyDeleteFrom my experience living in that part of the world the Scandinavian women have an unusual disrespect for their males.
During lunches and dinners it was not uncommon for a wife to casually bring up her sexual encounters and belittle the husband that would not respond. That was shocking. Then their views on male suicide is even more repugnant. They feel a great deal of anger towards men that take their own lives. A selfish act that means they are no longer taking care of the women for the rest of their lives.
"If my neighbour wants to marry two men, I wouldn't move or care. That's his or her choice."
I would not be surprised if this was probably an admission to her own love life or her secret life story she has planned out.
If a Swedish man wanted to have a mistress or another wife the response from Swedish women would be the death penalty.
Note just Swedish men not Muslim men. The media trick is you think they are referring to Muslims but the left has already settled that their polygamy is not an issue.
Opps messed up that last sentence should leave out the "about"
ReplyDelete"The proposal to legalise autonomy is being resisted by sections of the Centre Party. It might not get through..."
ReplyDeleteInstead of "autonomy," shouldn't that be "polygamy"?
Daybreaker, thanks. But I got a laugh out of my own error.
ReplyDeleteI see that the Centre Party has traditionally regarded the environment as a high priority.
ReplyDeleteWith that priority, you can't even propose bringing in a foreign species of bee or rat to displace the native ones; not without very strong scientific evidence that this will be harmless, and maybe not even then. Leaving it up to private individuals and their private decisions whether the country will be flooded with a non-native species or sub-species is right out - that would be irresponsible!
"Free immigration" plus polygamy is a proposal to get rid of the native sub-species of homo sapiens in favor of an invader, because it is (a) breeding interference, destabilizing the way the natives are accustomed to reproduce, and (b) habitat loss, since the native habitat will be flooded by foreigners. Mass immigration + forced integration and assimilation = white genocide.
Too bad for them that whites, unlike say dingoes, aren't considered a genetically valuable sub-species. If they were, they could easily be protected.
As it is, the objections to these proposed policies don't even consider the interests of Swedes in having a future.
Ah Sweden, my favourite basket case western nation.
ReplyDeleteSeems Mrs. Lööf's proposal has come a cropper and there is blow back. I dare say the only thing she will have learnt is to bring about her agenda in more surreptitious and nefarious (read anti-democratic) ways.
As for other party proposals such as a quadrupling of the current population (are you frikkin kidding me!!) I wonder what time frame they propose (I'm sure the third world will be there tomorrow) and how to go about increasing infrastructure and especially energy provision. Especially the part about energy, considering they are "Green" and anti-nuclear.
I wonder if the Centre Party would claim that they care about the polygamists themselves.
ReplyDeleteLewis would suggest maybe not. Your post, Mr. Richardson, reminded me of this passage in his book, The Problem of Pain. He's talking here about why a good God does not, like liberals, give us whatever we like, which he refers to as a kind of rootless and ultimately contemptuous kindness:
"There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object."
Liberalism demands that we accommodate everyone's wishes equally--i.e. we be equally "kind" to everyone--without asking whether those wishes are good or bad for them. Equal indifference to everyone's well-being is the logical result.
I thought I saw a reflection of that kind of thought in Mrs. Lööf's statement that, "If my neighbour wants to marry two men, I wouldn't move or care. That's his or her choice."
She freely states she would not "care" what effect her neighbor's choice had, neither on her neighbor nor anyone else. Lewis is right: there's no love or care in that kindness. It's more like contempt.
I thought I saw a reflection of that kind of thought
ReplyDeleteI think it's there. She says "I wouldn't move or care". It's like saying "Have what you want, as long as it doesn't affect me, who cares?"
I think she's wrong that it won't affect her (or at least her children or grandchildren) and I think she's wrong in not caring about the effects on someone else anyway.
As an aside, that's one problem with shifting from a closely tied together ethnic existence to a liberal individualistic one.
First, if we care about the future of our own ethnic tradition, that encourages us to raise our sights from thinking about ourselves alone, to the well-being of a larger group of people. We think about the commons.
Second, because we are related (we see ourselves in) members of our ethny, that too can prompt us to care about what happens to others.
It's true that we do also have a sense of caring about others not as members of our ethny but as fellow humans and Christianity encourages this.
But even so, there is a strength of relatedness in belonging to an ethnic tradition that is a good antidote to the kind of liberal indifference that the Centre Party leader seems to have fallen into.
"Have what you want, as long as it doesn't affect me, who cares?"
ReplyDeleteAnd that sums it up very well (apologies for starting a sentence with a conjunction). Many have become too complacent with the concept of seemingly mundane actions occurring in complete isolation without consequence, especially action out of sight. When something extraordinary happens no amount of time and effort is spared in understanding its occurrence in juxtaposition to the bereft efforts of awareness of the subtle and nuanced effects of the everyday "trivialities" which have an accumulative effect, that can lead to aforementioned extraordinary. Perchance this is why it so important for progressives to trivialise everything.