Friday, May 31, 2013

So what do the German green youth want?

The German Greens get a bit over 10% of the vote. They are apparently one of the more radically leftist parties around. Last month, their youth wing passed a resolution called "Queer your world". When I begin quoting it, you'll understand how radical it is. But at the same time it can also be seen as fitting in with trends in modern society.

Here is the part where sex distinctions are discussed:
8.9 Overcoming the sexual binary

The categories "man" and "woman" are social constructs, but the idea of two sexes does not accord with reality. We understand a human not as a person who is subject to a lifelong gender identity as a man or a woman. Our goal is to create a society in which everyone can freely decide for themselves which gender identity they would like to adopt. As Green Youth we argue for the diversity of gender identities to be finally recognised. A first step to envisage this is a third option when specifying sex to government agencies and in official documents. There should also be the opportunity to refuse to specify. Our perspective is that specifying gender should completely disappear as a category.

Such ideas are no doubt attractive to those homosexuals who do not have a clear identity as men or women. But they also fit in with the liberal idea that our lives should be individually self-determined and that predetermined qualities, such as our sex or our race, are artificial social constructs that should be made not to matter.

The Green Youth resolution is more radical than the typical liberal attitude: when liberals want to make our sex not matter they do so by advocating unisex parenting and such like rather than wanting the categories of man and woman to be abolished. In some ways, though, the Green Youth position is the ultimate expression of the liberal position: it demands a diversity of freely chosen sex identities to replace the binary of man and woman.

And is the Green Youth position all that much more radical than where liberalism has taken us when it comes to our communal identities? For Westerners, at least, these identities have been declared to be social constructs and abolished in the name of diversity. The Green Youth want to complete the job already begun in a liberal society and abolish our identities as men and women in the same way.

The Green Youth also have ideas on how marriage could be "queered":
3.3 As Green Youth we reject the privileging of marriage between "man" and "wife" and are committed to a family contract that allows all people to express their love equally and to take responsibility for one another. Since intimate relationships exist outside heterosexual and monogamous partnerships, it must be finally legally recognised when non-heterosexual couples or people living in polyamorous relationships or female friends take over the care of children together. Queer people shouldn't be discriminated against any longer in tax law nor in adoption law. In respect to this, we also demand that more than two people should legally qualify to be regarded as parents of a child. Family is when people care for each other and take on responsibility. We therefore demand that any form of family is supported and valued by society and before the law to the same degree. However the protection of marriage should no longer be anchored in the Basic Law. We want to abolish marriage as a state institution. Families deserve state protection, not marriage.

What's to be said of all this? First, note how open-ended the definition of family has become. It is just any arrangement of people who care for each other. And note the radical consequences of accepting such an open-ended definition. You can have any number of people being recognised as the parents of a child; you can have groups of friends becoming parents to a child; you can have polyamorists doing the same. The link to biological paternity and maternity is entirely disregarded, as is the role of motherhood and fatherhood. Literally any form of family will do.

Again, this is a more radical expression of ideas that are already fairly mainstream within a liberal culture. A lot of people now understand marriage to be a "love ceremony" and that tends to suggest the idea that a family can be anything. An Australian newspaper columnist, Andrea Burns, expressed the modern view well when she wrote:
the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home ... It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love...

There is a weakening or a loosening of ties in all this. Just consider the definition of family offered by Sam Page as executive director of Family Relationship Services Australia:
The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

I'm not sure that toothpaste sharing quite measures up to fulfilling your masculine nature in the role of a husband and father, or the biological relationship of paternity connecting father and child, or the complementary union of a man and a woman within marriage and family.

29 comments:

  1. That's a great, honest slogan: "Liberalism: we'll make sure you have toothpaste."

    And here is the real question: if families deserve "protection", but marriage is verboten, then from whom, exactly, are these "families" being given "protection"? Those who would deprive them of toothpaste?

    But who, exactly would such parties be? And why should the state be involved in "protection" if we're merely free-floating units in "care relationships"?

    We're here to prevent the prevention of sharing!

    What this actually means, of course, as is inherently the case with so-called gay marriage, is "I will make you approve of me."


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  2. One might wonder why the German Greens are peeling back defenses against Islam (re: polygamy) when, as a pro-homosexual party, they'll be among the first against the wall when Islam takes over.

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  3. Like a full blown drug addict that was once a casual user of recreational drugs, there will come a time when these leftist groups will no longer be satiated by just words or protests to get their "demands" met(even though western culture is moving in their direction). The new normal might be homegrown(non-Islamic) terrorism.

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  4. @randian
    " they'll be among the first against the wall when Islam takes over."

    Insha'Allah, man

    Insha'Allah.

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  5. The essential problem is that the modern liberal world still has two key social institutions that are fundamentally non-liberal: the nuclear family and citizenship. In fact, from the point of view of liberal principles, these things are downright horrible, and no less bad than, say, political privileges of hereditary nobility.

    This is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Citizenship in particular is a very close analogue of nobility: it's a hereditary title that confers great privileges. The nuclear family is even worse: it places the children under the authority of parents, which cannot be justified under any principle acknowledged by liberalism (i.e. it's neither a voluntary contract, nor an exercise of state authority that has a democratic, expert, or utilitarian rationale) -- and abolition of such authority is pretty much the core principle of liberalism. It also gives special legal status to a particular kind of relationship between the parents that, by liberal principles, should not be distinguishable from any other voluntary arrangement between people. (For liberals, its more immediately jarring aspect is the patriarchal authority of the husband, but even if that were eliminated and marriage made fully egalitarian, its traditional privilege over other lifestyle arrangements would still be unacceptable.)

    It follows that any principled and thoughtful liberal cannot see these institutions as anything but horrid relics of the nightmare pre-liberal past that must eventually be abolished. For a long time, liberals had many other goals to accomplish before they could hope to put these things on the agenda, and undoubtedly most of them didn't even think about these most radical implications of their ideology, whose realization would have seemed like an impossibly extreme and utopian goal back then. But now that all other non-liberal institutions have been effectively destroyed, these final implications are coming to the forefront with ineluctable force of logic. Hence the open borders and the marriage-abolitionism of the sort quoted above. (Of course, another important aspect of the latter, not made explicit in the quoted excerpts but certainly implied, is that the parental role must be seen strictly as a delegation of state authority under a utilitarian rationale, to be closely supervised and revocable.)

    One implication of all this is that any right-wing opposition that still accepts the basic liberal principles and doesn't go all the way to an out-and-out reactionary position is helpless and ineffective, since it can offer only illogical appeals to unprincipled exceptions as a counter-argument against each further push to make liberalism more logically consistent. Liberals are perfectly correct when they argue that their current ideological efforts are merely a further logical consequence of the same principles that motivated their past victories that were so decisive that the entire mainstream, including the mainstream right, acknowledges them as great moral progress.



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  6. randian,

    They're not stupid. Islam, especially in the West, stands absolutely zero chance against liberalism. Conservatives often try to interpret the relationship between liberals and Islam as one of "useful idiots," but while the pattern certainly exists, they have it exactly backwards who is playing which side there.



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  7. They're not stupid. Islam, especially in the West, stands absolutely zero chance against liberalism

    How do you figure? Liberals won't identify Islam as a threat and don't care how many Muslims immigrate to the West. By the time you're up to 10% or more Muslim population you've lost the game (and your country) unless you're willing to employ violence against the inevitable Muslim violence. While liberals are all too happy to employ violence against conservatives, they protect Muslims (just see what's happening in England) rather than stand against them.

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  8. randian,

    Think about it calmly for a minute. Liberals weren't born yesterday. They've been on a political and ideological winning streak for centuries, interrupted only by minor occasional setbacks, and otherwise constantly running circles around all opposition with their Machiavellian skill. And you believe that they would be so stupid as to destroy themselves with such a blatant mistake? Clearly that's absurd.

    Rightists who make predictions such as yours are usually motivated by wishful thinking, born out of their angry impotence, that someone will finally destroy the liberals. They are also often given by more mainstream-leaning conservatives, as a pathetic and inept tactic (as such tactics always are) to score points by out-lefting the liberals, arguing basically that liberals are bad because they threaten liberalism by allowing settlement of people with non-liberal views. One just needs to spell out their argument it in this more explicit way to see it for what it is.

    All people -- except for a handful of unbalanced individuals, who may cause occasional spectacular incidents, but pose no threat to the social order -- engage in violence only when they think they can win. And don't think that liberal regimes are incapable of sending a clear and credible message to their opponents that violence won't be tolerated, and lashing out mercilessly on anyone too obtuse to get the message. Certainly they've done this with their right-wing opponents wherever they hold power, and they can do it with anyone else who opposes them seriously, including Muslims. Of course, even the need for this is unlikely, given that Islam has no obvious special resistance to leftist assimilation compared to any other religion. (Especially when you consider that assimilation into the underclass is just as good strategically for the left.)

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  9. No I don't think Vladimir's right.

    There are two groups of liberals...

    Group A: People who are 'Liberal' to make me go extinct (the people who fund the liberal organizations)

    Group B: Really dumb people

    The 'liberals' of Group A will just abandon ship to a new ship (we all know where that is) once people like me are extinct.

    I don't think 'liberals' even of the group A variety would have a chance in hell if all whites thought like me.

    And yes, I know gun-toting liberals but they are of the B variety and they don't scare me.

    The A Variety only have power via money, finance, media. There power does not extend past that.





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  10. Vladimir at 6:10, right-on. Vladimir at 10:36, overplayed... or perhaps overstated.

    You may be right that Islam is not the force to unseat liberalism. That's too close to call. But on the other hand you speak in the second comment of liberalism almost as if it were a supernatural force, a claim belied by the impetus of the previous comment.

    Here's the basic problem, and it goes back to Hobbes: how does a state built entirely on the premise of voluntaristic allegiance get people to die for itself? This basic problem of the modern order has never received a normatively satisfying answer, so in practice the modern state must justify itself in terms antagonistic to the forces by which it is replicated. This is why your 6:10 post is so well-stated; the liberal order must parasitize the family and the culture.

    So the basic problem either with Islam or without is just who will defend the state. And to be accurate about this, we should probably say that people fighting for family, religion, or soil are defending the state at some level from *itself*; Islam is simply a precipitating occasion, or an opportunistic virus, if you will.

    Liberalism is not some grand masonic project held together over centuries by conscious devotees of a cult. It is just the latest and most virulent presentation of a basic set of human tendencies. Read the last three books of Plato's Republic and you will get a pretty good analysis of the situation.

    It is therefore likely to result in the destruction of its host culture or state in much the same way as a primitive parasite kills its host organism. Viewing this as some sort of "victory streak" is not quite right.

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  11. Yeh I don't agree with Vlad's idea that Liberals are playing the field with any longterm foresight.
    I've suspected for a long time that the Liberal elite who are using others will jump ship to safe havens. ie decision makers in the UK will flee to holiday islands.
    The problem is Liberals are helping or have created a world where there is no where to flee.
    As they ruin safe western societies they are reducing the habitable land for them to survive in.
    You could say then that they will live in gated communities or be advisors to Socialist dictators (all real examples) but these will be besieged and won't survive.
    Its an accurate prediction not out of wishful thinking but what has happened in countries already and throughout history.

    Liberalism is the ideology of dying socialist old men and women with no interest in the future and exploited youth who will lose everything! Their entire civilisation.

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  12. What has this got to do with green issues? Nothing. Yet many, probably most, people attracted to a "Green Youth" would have come for the "green" issues.

    It's very common for left liberals to use organizations that say they are about issue A to push issues B, C and D as well. I think this works out well for them. I think this is how they get control of institutions and make them effective from a left liberal point of view.

    If a small number of people in an organization are pushing intently and persistently for a principled left liberal statement on issue D, it helps them if the mass of people in the organization that aren't hot on this statement don't really get the point, don't want to argue about it, and aren't educated about it. So if you want a strong gender statement, a party that attracts people who want to talk about the environment and have booked themselves up to be able to talk back about that might be the right place, and if you want a strong statement about war, an organization of lawyers with little competence to argue back against activists on the issue would be a good place to go, and so on.

    That suggests three things.

    First, there is a need not just for feel-good "conservative" imaging but for ideological education directed to people who are just starting out. It has to be clear, accessible, principled and applicable. In other words, what Mark Richardson is doing is on the mark, and a Reagan-style "morning in Australia" campaign would not be a substitute for it.

    Second, any time some leftists start pushing an ideological statement that doesn't look like it's a practical problem for your organization but doesn't look relevant either, it is important to oppose it. The multitude of such statements is cumulatively important.

    Third, it's really hard to have enough educated real conservatives in place in every irrelevant organization where left liberals, or for that matter right liberals, might start pushing an agenda. Attack dominates defense. So conservatives need to start pushing their agendas, and start competing with attack against attack, in the long run. Which means there has to be a positive conservative agenda, and again Mark Richardson is on the mark.

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  13. Also again people should refer to history Islam is the perfect (no compliment) besieging force of safe havens.
    They will never relent attacking Liberals. They already attack Liberals openly at mosques calling them "useful idiots" themselves.

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  14. Oh and another thing. Liberals have been busy establishing countless justifications for non-westerners to pillage and plunder westerner society.
    The fact is they didn't need it but they have openly invited foreign elements to attack them.

    When push comes to shove Muslims and other liberal allies will not know or care how to tell friend from foe.
    Crying out "Oh wait don't attack me i'm a liberal!" will have no affect.

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  15. randian: "Liberals won't identify Islam as a threat and don't care how many Muslims immigrate to the West."

    Right. And this includes right liberals as well as left liberals.

    It was continuing Muslim immigration under right liberals like George W. Bush that convinced me that the "global war on terror" was a scam. The anti-white establishment is fighting rivals of Israel; it's not fighting jihad and Sharia and opposing Muslim infiltration into white, Christian countries.

    randian: "By the time you're up to 10% or more Muslim population you've lost the game (and your country) unless you're willing to employ violence against the inevitable Muslim violence."'

    You haven't lost your country if it's not your country. If it's your enemies' country you are doing great.

    The simple version of that is; American liberals (right and left) are not defending America or any of our historically white and Christian countries, but they do fight for Israel.

    I think for the great mass of liberals that are not Jewish, and that may be quite critical of Israel, the more important truth is that they no longer identify with and struggle to defend and confer benefits on our real, flesh-and-blood nations. Emotionally, they live here, but they are cosmopolitan citizens of the liberal world. If Islam destroys our societies, they (liberals of right and left) going to do that to us anyway, so fine.

    I agree with them, to some extent. After mass immigration and forced integration ends us as identifiable peoples, is it a problem for us if Islam takes over? Not at all. For me, that's the death of my entire race, for liberals right and left it's a paradise where the oppressor is no more, but whether you regard the end of the game as a win or a loss the game is over.

    Remember also: it's hard to identify real enemies external to your ideology, if you think that's what's real is oppression through "white skin privilege" and similar constructs, and all white male identities are just masks for illegitimate "supremacist" aggression based on lies, and that everything that fights that genuine oppression is essentially resistance and should not be "reified". It too is just a set of masks, but for good and freedom rather than evil and tyranny.

    Now how can you take Islam as it really is seriously with that attitude? It's hard to.

    randian: "While liberals are all too happy to employ violence against conservatives, they protect Muslims (just see what's happening in England) rather than stand against them."

    Of course.

    Liberals are "pink rabbits": they may look white (often because they are purely white), but no matter how white they are genetically they have no loyalty to whites as such. In fact they are anti-white (which they call "anti-racist") and when the white Christian male oppressor perishes, they mark that down as a win for them.

    What kind of Hell comes after that doesn't matter to them (or me); they just want to win and celebrate:

    They want us to join their fighting
    But our answer today
    Is to let all our worries
    Like the breeze through our fingers slip away
    Peace has come to Zimbabwe
    Third World's right on the one
    Now's the time for celebration
    Cause we've only just begun

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  16. liberals fight for Israel
    This is painfully wrong.

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  17. Strongly committed anti-white liberals see us and our whiteness the way Captain Ahab saw the white whale Moby Dick and its whiteness: as a mask of evil; in the case of liberals, of "oppression", that being the only real evil and the essence of all tyranny.

    Ahab is gonna keep chasing the whale. To understand him is to know that.

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  18. Strongly committed American social liberals such as Sheldon Adelson do fight for Israel.

    Many other liberals do not, and can be quite critical of Israel.

    That's why it's important to focus on the bigger picture: not on the minority of liberals, right and left, that do have a country of their own that they do defend, but on the more numerous and in a sense more fanatical liberals who don't defend any real country, and will destroy ours without concern.

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  19. You haven't lost your country if it's not your country. If it's your enemies' country you are doing great.

    Fair enough. But once liberals have lost Europe to Islam, Israel to Islam, and the US to whatever, as seems the primary side effect of their goals and preferred policies, where are they going to go? Seems to me they're condemning their descendants to extinction or slavery.

    The simple version of that is; American liberals (right and left) are not defending America or any of our historically white and Christian countries, but they do fight for Israel.

    They do? Not from where I'm sitting. Not the left anyway. They're quite happy to see Israel destroyed, and are getting more open about it by the day.

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  20. randian: "Fair enough. But once liberals have lost Europe to Islam, Israel to Islam, and the US to whatever, as seems the primary side effect of their goals and preferred policies, where are they going to go? Seems to me they're condemning their descendants to extinction or slavery."

    They don't have to go anywhere, because they won. Oppression, read white Christian males, are done, war is over.

    You are thinking in terms of a flesh and blood people, in a homeland with real soil. But liberals don't think like that; to them Blood and Soil (German: Blut und Boden) means one thing: NAZI!!

    From the point of view of a politically correct person who thinks that Planet Earth is their home (in this incarnation), the only danger to it is ecologically destructive white males. Your concern makes no sense, and if you wanted to talk about the future you should have been discussing either global warming or the polluting, oppressive West.

    Of course if people like that are influential on the government of a white nation - and the Green Youth are doing their best - that nation is under a death sentence.

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  21. That should have read: "Oppression, read the white Christian male, is done, war is over."

    And seriously, some leftists do a great job of personally manifesting post-masculinity.

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  22. Off-topic (like we weren't getting off-topic anyway): Mark, I thought you might find this interesting. The new party Liberty GB seems to want to think outside the right liberal box.

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  23. Every time you here that something is 'privileged' understand that it is just ENVY in disguise.

    These people are envious of other what they see as setting the standards and disagreeing with the way they want the world to be.

    ENVY is the driving force for liberalism and the left.

    The devil himself was envious about all else, and wanted to destroy ALL distinctions and differences he didn't like.

    Especially the one where he wasn't GOD.

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  24. Seems to me they're condemning their descendants to extinction or slavery.

    They don't care about their descendants. They are nihilists and hedonists. What happens after they die is irrelevant to them - they only care about feeling personal pleasure NOW.

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  25. Nah: "They don't care about their descendants. They are nihilists and hedonists. What happens after they die is irrelevant to them - they only care about feeling personal pleasure NOW."
    -
    The apocalypse of the politically correct, anthropogenic global warming, is real for them. That's not a matter of immediate pleasures and pains.

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  26. REG: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man--

    STAN: Or woman.

    REG: Why don't you shut up about women, Stan. You're putting us off.

    STAN: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.

    FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan?

    STAN: I want to be one.

    REG: What?

    STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me 'Loretta'.

    REG: What?!

    LORETTA: It's my right as a man.

    JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

    LORETTA: I want to have babies.

    REG: You want to have babies?!

    LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.

    REG: But... you can't have babies.

    LORETTA: Don't you oppress me.

    REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!

    LORETTA: crying

    JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies.

    FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

    REG: What's the point?

    FRANCIS: What?

    REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!

    FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

    REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.


    Life of Brian
    Scene 8: The Grumpy People's Front of Judea

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  27. "The apocalypse of the politically correct, anthropogenic global warming, is real for them. That's not a matter of immediate pleasures and pains."

    I tend to disagree. Progressivism/modernism is existentionally Dadaist, which is a kind of Gnosticism. Not a love of knowledge but the secret knowledge as an end in itself - without divine guidance.

    Humans crave mystery. In the absence of a belief in the supernatural, shamans create new worldly wheels within wheels.

    You who have no understanding of the underlying culture merely project onto modernism your complex system of trad thinking.

    Cheers.


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  28. Sorry, that's existentially, if that's a word.

    My prediction: Until the Museum of Modern Art (or its various sisters, i.e., Tate Modern, Pompidou, etc.) folds into a European Trad Museum of Art, modern Liberalism will go on, roughly in its present form.

    The deconstruction of the West will continue with the proliferation of sub-ethnic museums. Eventually, various western National Galleries will become European Art Museums among a welter of others as each identity group seeks to define itself through its own artifacts and icons.

    Maybe there will be a Green Museum one day.

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