#pillarisation

[thethirdromana]

The droughtula is lasting forever so here are some headcanons about Dracula's characters' politics.

Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming) Let's get the difficult one out of the way first. Arthur is nobility, a hereditary peer in the House of Lords, in the 1890s. He's literally entitled to a say on legislation solely because of who his ancestors were. So he's unlikely to have views that we'd find sympathetic in 2023, and is probably a Tory.

He's well-travelled and outward-looking, so I think his greatest political concern is empire. He's eager to ensure that Britain is victorious in the Scramble for Africa, concerned about growing tensions with the Boers in South Africa, and admires the leadership of Lord Salisbury.

(sorry about this)

Jonathan Harker I think Jonathan is and always will be aware of how lucky he's been, as an orphan who's then catapulted into vast wealth thanks to the generosity of Mr Hawkins. As a result, I think he would be very keen to support others and generally vote for a government that's focused on the eradication of poverty. At the same time, I don't think he would be particularly radical; I think he would shy away from revolutionary thinking.

I see him finding reasonably a happy home in the 1890s Liberals, and supporting the beginnings of the welfare state in the early 1900s. He might even join the Fabian Society. By the 1920s, his sympathies would shift to the Labour Party.

Mina Harker I've written a bit about Mina's politics already. The obvious question is what she thinks of women's suffrage, and I'm inclined to say that her view is that women should have the vote one day, but not yet. At least, not at a national level; I think she'd support the move in the 1890s to allow women to vote in local elections. She would be more focused on women's access to education, so that when the time came for them to get the vote, they would be educated enough to use it wisely.

Unfortunately one other thing we know about Mina is that she's interested in physiognomy, a pseudoscience that's connected to eugenics. So it's depressingly plausible that a real-life Mina would have an interest in eugenics as well.

Lucy Westenra I think Lucy is probably less politically aware than Mina is, but also quite possibly more radical in her views. After all, we see more of Lucy chafing against her social role than we do Mina (though Lucy's life is also a lot more restricted than Mina's). As an upper-middle or upper-class woman, doing charitable works is a big part of her role. That would bring her into contact with poverty, and I think she would want to do whatever she could to help.

I don't think she would be formally a member of any campaigning organisations, but I suspect she might be sympathetic to the temperance movement. That would be her route to women's suffrage, as the two causes were connected in the 1890s. Where Mina might worry that women lacked the education to use their vote wisely, Lucy would feel that in a good marriage, a husband would help his wife to make the right choices.

Abraham Van Helsing One sec, just need to give myself a crash course in Dutch politics of the 1890s.

OK I'm back. Dutch society at this time was divided based mostly on religion: Protestant, Catholic and a secular socialist grouping. This was called 'Verzuiling' ("pillarisation") and it meant that each of the sections of society were effectively segregated: separate schools, separate institutions, separate newspapers and little intermarriage between the "pillars".

By rights that puts Van Helsing into the Catholic pillar, but I can't see it - this is a man whose close friend is an English Protestant who's half his age. The group most likely to oppose the notion of Verzuiling were the Liberals, sometimes treated as a pillar of their own. And I think that's where Van Helsing would most naturally fit.

People who learned about this bit of Dutch history more than five minutes ago should feel free to chime in.

Quincey Morris I know about as much about US politics in the 1890s as I do Dutch politics, but that's not going to stop me.

I instinctively feel that Quincey Morris has strong views on something relatively niche, like the adoption of the gold standard. So I'm pleased to learn that the adoption of the gold standard was in fact a live political debate in the US in the 1890s. Quincey is in favour. He supports hard money policies and - as a wealthy landowner - particularly worries about the rise of the People's Party back home.

Jack Seward The biggest wildcard of the lot. Other than Van Helsing, I think Jack is the character most likely to have read widely and to be open to unexpected ideas. But ultimately I think his attitude to politics is driven by his interest in and desire for technological progress, which would lead him towards the Liberal Party.

He would be horrified by Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury's repeated opposition to change (e.g. his 1879 statement that "Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible"). If he lives long enough, he'll be delighted by Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech in the early 1960s.

[arcticdementor]

Intentionally or by accident, the West is developing the equivalent of the Chinese reputational rating system. The New York Times describes how in Xinjiang "children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere." Then the data is fed into a system and scored according to a Communist Party virtue rating system. Fact-checkers monitor social media to see who's expressed offensive opinions or joined any Hate Groups. The virtuous are rewarded but low scorers on Beijing's community guidelines can be stopped from traveling, excluded from admission to schools, banned from social media platforms, charged in court and doxxed.

If non-Chinese find it disturbingly familiar it is no coincidence. The same technology is involved in policing both the West and the Middle Kingdom. In the West the social scoring system is not yet official but Newsweek has already asked: should racism and hate be illegal? It happily pointed out that "most of those who advocate a ban insist it need not interfere with American democracy. As Jack Greenberg of Columbia University points out, incitement to racial violence is outlawed in most liberal democracies, including Britain, Israel and most of Western Europe."

Organizations dedicated to identifying "hate groups" have proliferated, most notably the Southern Poverty Law Center. Its blacklist is so extensive it has to be divided into categories, including male supremacy, hate music, and radical traditional Catholicism.  Ironically the SPLC has itself also been accused of being a hate group after its founder and guiding light, Morris Dees, was blamed for sexual harassment and racial prejudice. Over time there will be many more organizations dedicated to resource and platform denial.

…

Self-sovereign identity, reputational scoring systems and the Internet of Things have made possible the  subdivision of the public space. Through identity devices and ultimately biometrics "every lock, lock access controller, card reader and other associated devices" can be told whether to let a particular individual pass or not. China already has a Muslim tracker system called the "Integrated Joint Operations Platform (Ijop), a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around Xinjiang’s cities. Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the boundaries of his local police precinct, would trigger the Ijop to alert police" to someone on the blacklist.

That blacklist system is coming to the West. The New York Times already has suggestions on "how banks could control gun sales if Washington won't:"

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

…

It worked not by building bridges but by accepting walls. "One country, two systems" has already been proposed by Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney as a possible solution for Northern Ireland after Brexit. There need be no checkpoints because modern technology makes it possible to apply different rules to individuals in the same physical space making it feasible for affinity groups intermingle yet capture the costs and benefits of the identities they choose.

Imagine a world where Red Card holders cannot apply for abortions at Blue Card institutions nor illegal immigrants will find their cards honored at Red Card institutions; where the Blue Cards can't buy guns and pay higher taxes but the Reds forswear public education and health in favor of a school and insurance voucher. It would not be so very different from the place we already know today.

The space we inhabit is already delimited by many boundaries described by membership.  Private airline lounges are closed to economy travelers at airports. The doors to restaurants, hotels and shops are effectively shut to illegal aliens and poor people who go to San Francisco. The deceptive absence of physical walls belies the fact there are virtual barriers everywhere. It's those barriers that count.

Expect this trend to continue. As the hate lists grow, exclusions proliferate and safe spaces expand, rival groups will secede not into their physical enclaves but into their cards. Building virtual nations may be the boom industry of the 21st century.

[dutch-and-flemish-painters]

Tjerk Bottema - Cartoon of Abraham Kuyper "Lousy Sinterklaas" - December 5, 1909

Abraham Kuijper (29 October 1837 – 8 November 1920), publicly known as Abraham Kuyper, was Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905, an influential neo-Calvinist theologian and also a journalist. He established the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, which upon its foundation became the second largest Reformed denomination in the country behind the state-supported Dutch Reformed Church.

In addition, he founded a newspaper, the Free University of Amsterdam and the Anti-Revolutionary Party. In religious affairs, he sought to adapt the Dutch Reformed Church to challenges posed by the loss of state financial aid and by increasing religious pluralism in the wake of splits that the church had undergone in the 19th century, rising Dutch nationalism, and the Arminian religious revivals of his day which denied predestination. He vigorously denounced modernism in theology as a fad that would pass away. In politics, he dominated the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) from its founding in 1879 to his death in 1920. He promoted pillarisation, the social expression of the anti-thesis in public life, whereby Protestant, Catholic and secular elements each had their own independent schools, universities and social organisations.

Pillarisation (Dutch: verzuiling) is the politico-denominational segregation of a society. These societies were (and in some areas, still are) "vertically" divided into several segments or "pillars" (zuilen, singular zuil) according to different religions or ideologies. The best-known examples of this have historically occurred in the Netherlands and Belgium.

These pillars all have their own social institutions: their own newspapers, broadcasting organisations, political parties, trade unions and farmers' associations, banks, schools, hospitals, universities, Scouting organisations and sports clubs. Some companies even hire only personnel of a specific religion or ideology. This leads to a situation where many people have no personal contact with people from another pillar.

Austrian, Iraqi Arab, Israeli, Lebanese, Maltese, Nigerian, Northern Irish, and Scottish societies may also be considered to have displayed aspects of pillarisation, historically or in the present time.

Tjerk Bottema (Bovenknijpe (municipality of Schoterland) 4 March 1882 - died on the sea on 21 June 1940) was a Dutch visual artist.

Bottema was born in 1882 as the son of the farmer Johannes Bottema and Tjitske de Vries. He was educated at the arts and crafts school Quellinus in Amsterdam. From 1901 to 1904 he followed the course at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. He was a pupil of August Allebé, Georg Sturm and Nicolaas van der Waay. He also received lessons at the Academy of Antwerp. Bottema worked as a visual artist in various locations in Friesland and outside Friesland in the province of North Holland and in Amsterdam. He worked abroad in Belgium, Germany, England, France and Italy.

Bottema was, among other things, draftsman, painter and graphic designer. For example, he produced prints for the political-satirical magazine De Notenkraker.

Bottema died on June 21, 1940 when the ship the Berenice was torpedoed in the Channel. On board the ship were also the poet Hendrik Marsman and his wife.

He was the brother of the well-known artist Tjeerd Bottema.

[psqqa]

Professor Van Helsing!! Of Amsterdam!!!!!

[fruityyamenrunner]

my take is even spicier.

back in the day, it was quite clear that decent people didn't say "damn" or "shit" or "fuck" and anyone who did was at best marginal and this was universal and it functioned fine as an 😇 v 😈 thing

now there's a whole set of constellations of swear words and it is structured so that certain classes of people are to be treated as 😇 even if they swear with one particular constellation, with everyone not in the class getting coded as a 😈.

anyone taking a maximalist position that certain words are inherently 😈 or that all words are 😇 is living on Victorian Mars and mocked soundly.

so not only are we cursed to live in an age of vibrant, rather than bleached and codified, taboos, we are doomed to live in strife where people argue whether someone, or whole classes of people are an 😇 or a 😈 or not.

not being a confucian, i think the causation runs in the direction of "there are deep rifts in society that can only be bridged and not healed" -> "people wanting pillarised taboo words" rather than the other way round.

i think the 20th century system of people knowing they shouldn't say fuck and bugger without having any good rationale was not tenable and was a sort of unstable transition period between "sex as core taboo" and "identitarian strife as core taboo".

remember how profanity was made out to be the worst thing in the world when you were a kid and then when you grew up everyone was like "just kidding, nobody actually cares, we were just doing that so we could yell at you"

[skinfeeler]

i read twisted road to genocide by henri zukier today. the original published paper published in 1994.

it was an interesting read in a couple ways i hadn’t expected. while i feel that its portrayal of functionalism wasn’t exactly fair — functionalists are (to my knowledge and limited methodological expertise) mostly not ‘fluke historians’ and i feel a lot of this paper could have been written in a way that it would fit the archetypal functionalist canon, or at least the newer groupshift synthesis — there still were a lot of rebuttals of rhetoric that exists now still in some shape or form. turns out that the ‘financial anxiety’ type of apologia has existed for a long time, as noted under the ‘economic hardships’ section in the enumeration of various attempts to explain away necessary insights about the holocaust. i don’t think one can really say that ‘history repeats itself’ (or could be at risk to) in a methodologically sound sense, but it was certainly a great overview overview of rebuttals of those who would seek to replicate its horrors with the qualities of balance in cadence and formulaism that i find lacking in many papers. i will probably send it to family too since so far i’ve had little success in convincing anyone but my siblings of the structural complicity that was present in general but especially in the netherlands specifically. hopefully a well-cited academical source not written by the family’s problem child might do more to sway them. i visited the ‘resistance museum’ in amsterdam last summer. i kind of knew what to expect but it was disheartening to see it match the propaganda (mostly in the form of fictional quasi-historical narratives read to children in my circles, including me) in which a certain volksgeist of lionised mass resistance (of protestant bent) was attributed to the netherlands which seems largely unsusceptible to anything in the realm of coherent  histiography. this holds true even with the elucidation that many ministers preaching against the nazis and collaboration were also communists (who in this museum were framed as ‘socialists’ to be equated with the ‘national-socialists’, and therefore any and all communism in any advocates at all was erased) with every present piece of history (clippings of newspapers, pamphlets, photographs, and so on and so forth) framed with the appropriate text to soothe the sensibilities of visitors who were seemingly presumed to be gentile and generally culturally christian (and therefore, not queer or communist) and to appropriate both self-defense of targeted communities as well as leftist resistance (which of course largely overlapped) to this particular contingent.

no mention was made of the connections between say, calvinism and the general complicity of civil servants in doing the administrative work — wordly powers are not to be questioned, as all power derives from god according to paul of tarsus — that precipitated the majority of jewish people in the netherlands being murdered, with one of the highest death rates per capita in europe. while the netherlands wasn’t mentioned in this article, denmark was, which largely appears to have exhibited the opposite qualities in at least the bureaucracy and thus also largely yielded inverse results. there is more to say on this with regards to the dutch history of (ethno)religious segregation/pillarisation/federalism and the particular role that dynamic played in our country’s history (and continues to, with some would-be social planners with ambiguous intentions wanting islam to become a new ‘pillar’), but that’s not really what i want to focus on right now.

simply put, i could declare myself content with being more critical than my culturally christian family and the narrative of the culturally christian netherlands in general, especially as i am exiled from these structures and therefore have little personal interest in defending them— or even from refraining to attack them. however, especially after reading this paper, i have to come to the conclusion that i haven’t really developed beyond these relatively straightforward insights (even if they are rare in my country) in any real way for a few years now. what i think was extremely valuable in this article for me was not only the denunciation of the anti-sociological assertion that good and evil are essential properties of a human being but building on that, that they are ‘nurtured qualities of the mind’. i do not agree with this proposition without caveats for reasons beyond the scope of this piece of writing, however, the way that zukier expounds on this is, i believe, of timeless relevance. the nazis constantly stressed the horrors of their actions and indeed many battalions weeded out those too eager to engage in them — as one example people who volunteered to perform executions were summarily dismissed — but nevertheless viewed them perhaps not even so much as duties in service of some larger goal. however, first, crucially, considerations of such were seen and treated as largely external to any notion of morality or ideology worth considering, which he expounds on at length over the course of the history of nazi germany.

here lies something i think is crucial to any such person or people who see themselves as grand architects of ideology and the future (and i myself have been partial to this at some points): you cannot let yourself become callous to the existence of such forces of which you are not the primary target. there is no excuse for letting orthogonal ideological interests outweigh the threat of mass oppression and violence, especially in a time where such things are emergent again. there is responsibility in what projects one considers themselves part of and in the scope of these projects, to root out such indifference. even in light of certain zionist histiographies who have constructed a new continuity to integrate the holocaust in a historical and metaphysical scheme that leads from there to redemption through the state of israel in the levant (quoting zukier almost verbatim), one cannot allow themselves to be caught into cooperating with this sophistry where to disagree with such narratives must necessarily co-implicate indifference (or even hostility) to the people involved. no antizionist or antitheist schema can permit any form of ideological reductionism or bargaining of the still very real threat of genocide which may very well become institutional in a number of countries in the near future, as it has before.

to acknowledge this much in spite of the muddying of this issue by bad faith actors (whether in the form of zionist genocide enthusiasts or white supremacists and their useful idiots who seek to bargain or deny the holocaust) is necessary for everyone, and i very much also assert this to myself as an un-christian (and queer and trans and so forth) but still nevertheless gentile person. this much is clear regardless of any and all complex geopolitical reasonings which in the scope of this particular issue are really only worth mentioning in the abstract, even if they are very much worth discussing on their own terms— indeed, criticisms must exist which separate the struggle against bigotry from certain imperialist and pro-family agendas and to refuse such actors the monopoly on these issues. i’ll make sure to send this piece to my various academical peers and to discuss this with them to keep in mind even as we strive towards other common goals together— which must be and are by definition synonymous with exactly this refusal to equate the two. however, as established, defining and stating one’s owns interests is hardly enough when it comes to this kind of subject, and failure to do so cannot be tolerated, and this i insist to any fellow adversaries of organised religion who might read this.

[knuckleduster]

“Television broadcasting was also pillarised, but everyone watched the same broadcasts nonetheless, since initially only one channel was available in the Netherlands in the 1950s.” this is so funny

[utilitymonstermash]

“What we saw from the minute-by-minute analysis of last night’s broadcast that Republicans are beginning to hit the snooze button on award shows as these broadcasts turn more and more into political stump speeches. We did note that new viewers are showing up to the Oscars proven by the fact that 46% of this years viewers did not watch the 2016 Oscars. But these new viewers were not enough to replace the ones who dropped off. For example, 42% of heavy Fox news viewers who watched the 2016 Oscars did not tune in to this years show. Of the Oscars viewers for 2016 and 2017, last year’s audience consisted of 46% Fox News viewers, 32% CNN viewers, and 16% of MSNBC viewers. This year it was 45% CNN, 30% Fox News, and 23% MSNBC.”

[dark-bear-productions]

My initial thought was "Hm, I definitely like Student and Graduate, but Professor feels weird for things like smithing, sailing, cooking."

Then I realised that was (1)very elitist of me and (2)very Dutch of me (because we really only call people with the highest teaching rank within a university Professor, not """just""" teachers at universities or colleges in general).

Looking into it, Professor apparently comes from the Latin "person who professes to be an expert in some art or science; teacher of highest rank", which fully fits the description of what are now Masters. Moreover, the term Associate implies someone who has moved beyond being a Graduate and is now strongly associated with a specific Professor and their work and teachings.

It would be a more individualist stratisfied segmented pillarised system (boy, finding the right word was a trick, am I really a writer?). Climbing through the Ranks would be less tied to the job you're doing for the community and more to how closely you can come to a specific expert. But it does definitely work, and it's free of gender roles, which was the goal.

I like it!

How would you replace the word Journeyman?

I realise Journeyperson exists, and I encourage its use, but it does feel like a term specifically designed to replace Journeyman, rather than a title that formed organically in a place that puts no stock in gender roles. And since that's exactly what I wanted the City of Fenblith to be, the word just wouldn't do.

The other titles were simple enough. Those who were training for a trade were Novices; those who had mastered it, Masters. Since I had decided to call the levels of expertise Ranks, those who had finished their training would be Ranked, with those not allowed to have a vocation being Unranked.

But there had to be something between Ranked and Master. Something to indicate you were more than just someone capable of performing your job, but not quite someone who understood its every facet.

Eventually, it was Warhammer 40K that offered me the solution in the form of the Priesthood of Mars, whose members are known as Tech Adepts.

Someone who's an adept is "a highly skilled or well-trained individual." That was the perfect description for what I was trying to name, and the term was gender neutral to boot.

So now, the people of Fenblith start their careers as Novices, become Ranked when they finish their training, and Adepts if they prove particularly skilled at their vocation, with only a few of them ever becoming Masters.

I'm happy with that outcome. Still, I'm curious: what would you have done?

[haunting-kind-of-high]

☕️ - America lol

Ohh boy

For the sake of everyone, I'm gonna keep it as brief as possible because I can definitely go off about America lmao

I'm not a fan of their legal and political system, I'm not a fan of the whole jury-thing, I'm not a fan of the fact that the president has a say in who's in the Supreme Court, I'm not a fan of how political colour decides who's in the Supreme Court. I'm not a fan of the fact that a presidential candidate can win the election despite not having a majority vote from the population. I'm not a fan of having to register to vote. I'm not a fan of felons not being able to vote

I'm not a fan of how American media seems to be so pillarised, I'm not a fan of their gun policy. I'm not a fan of their lack of universal health care. I'm not a fan of the level of the minimum wage in some places, I'm not a fan of the cost of university. I'm not a fan of the 'America is the best and everything else sucks' patriotism. I'm not a fan of the glorification of the military, or of the way minorities are treated. I'm not a fan of the fact that in some aspects, it's like America's still stuck in the Cold War or the fact that it doesn't seem like there's a lot of social mobility.

America isn't really a welfare state and I'm not really vibing with that. But one of my best friends is American, so... there's that. I'm very happy that he exists at the very least

[release-info]

The six largest cities in the Netherlands are Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Eindhoven and Tilburg. Amsterdam is the country’s capital,[13] while The Hague holds the seat of the States General, Cabinet and Supreme Court.[14] The Port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe, and the largest in any country outside Asia.[15] The country is a founding member of the EU, Eurozone, G10, NATO, OECD and WTO, as well as a part of the Schengen Area and the trilateral Benelux Union. It hosts several intergovernmental organisations and international courts, many of which are centered in The Hague, which is consequently dubbed ‘the world’s legal capital’.[16] Netherlands literally means ‘lower countries’ in reference to its low elevation and flat topography, with only about 50% of its land exceeding 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) above sea level, and nearly 17% falling below sea level.[17] Most of the areas below sea level, known as polders, are the result of land reclamation that began in the 16th century. With a population of 17.30 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,500 square kilometres (16,000 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,700 square kilometres (13,000 sq mi)—the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Nevertheless, it is the world’s second-largest exporter of food and agricultural products (after the United States), owing to its fertile soil, mild climate, and intensive agriculture.[18][19] The Netherlands has been a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a unitary structure since 1848. The country has a tradition of pillarisation and a long record of social tolerance, having legalised abortion, prostitution and human euthanasia, along with maintaining a progressive drug policy. The Netherlands abolished the death penalty in 1870, allowed women’s suffrage in 1917, and became the world’s first country to legalise same-sex marriage in 2001. Its mixed-market advanced economy had the thirteenth-highest per capita income globally. The Netherlands ranks among the highest in international indexes of press freedom,[20] economic freedom,[21] human development, and quality of life, as well as happiness.[22][i]The Netherlands’ turbulent history and shifts of power resulted in exceptionally many and widely varying names in different languages. There is diversity even within languages. This holds also for English, where Dutch is the adjective form and the misnomer Holland a synonym for the country “Netherlands”. Dutch comes from Theodiscus and in the past centuries, the hub of Dutch culture is found in its most populous region, Holland, home to the capital city of Amsterdam; government headquarters at The Hague; and Europe’s largest port Rotterdam. Referring to the Netherlands as Holland in the English language is similar to calling the United Kingdom “Britain” by people outside the UK. The term is so pervasive among potential investors and tourists, however, that the Dutch government’s international websites for tourism and trade are “holland.com” and “hollandtradeandinvest.com”.[24] The region of Holland consists of North and South Holland, two of the nation’s twelve provinces, formerly a single province, and earlier still, the County of Holland, a remnant of the dissolved Frisian Kingdom. Following the decline of the Duchy of Brabant and the County of Flanders, Holland became the most economically and politically important county in the Low Countries region. The emphasis on Holland during the formation of the Dutch Republic, the Eighty Years’ War and the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the 16th, 17th and 18th century, made Holland serve as a pars pro toto for the entire country, which is now considered either incorrect,[25][26] informal,[27] or, depending on context, opprobrious. Nonetheless, Holland is widely used in reference to the Netherlands national football team.[28] The region called the Low Countries (comprising Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and the Country of the Netherlands, have the same toponymy. Place names with Neder (or lage), Nieder, Nether (or low) and Nedre (in Germanic languages) and Bas or Inferior (in Romance languages) are in use in places all over Europe. They are sometimes used in a deictic relation to a higher ground that consecutively is indicated as Upper, Boven, Oben, Superior or Haut. In the case of the Low Countries / Netherlands the geographical location of the lower region has been more or less downstream and near the sea. The geographical location of the upper region, however, changed tremendously over time, depending on the location of the economic and military power governing the Low Countries area. The Romans made a distinction between the Roman provinces of downstream Germania Inferior (nowadays part of Belgium and the Netherlands) and upstream Germania Superior (nowadays part of Germany). The designation ‘Low’ to refer to the region returns again in the 10th century Duchy of Lower Lorraine, that covered much of the Low Countries.[29][30] But this time the corresponding Upper region is #tourism#tour#worldtour #bestplace#nature#beauty enjoy#experience#history http://bit.ly/2WUn2Oa

[dvmni]

The Netherlands really only seem accepting towards different race and such if you ask me. I live in a small town and it’s probably one of the most hateful/racist places you could live in the Netherlands. As accepting as the Netherlands are in a lot of things, be it the lgbt+ community, or whatever, that’s how unaccepting my hometown is, even if you are only slightly out of the “norm”. It’s a hell hole. And people don’t seem to know that even in the Netherlands many places like this exist.

Yeah I have been discovering this lately as well. I’m glad I live at least near a bigger city where it ‘s super diverse and I grew up with my different cultures. But all of them have different stories of how they grew up. 

But pillarisation isn’t even gone for that long so in that sense I can at least somewhat understand the small mindedness in smaller villages. Sadly time is needed. I wouldn't call it a hell hole though, it's not like those out of the norm are denied education or have segregated bathrooms. 

[orangejuice-inmyveins]

Stop debating whether Marxism or Capitalism is the best system, reject the pillarisation of the false left-right spectrum, Fascism is THE best political ideology. Period.

[arcticdementor]

The spread of liberalism didn’t stop European nations from enthusiastically colonising the rest of the globe, nor did it have much of a noticeable impact on the popularity of euthanasia and scientific racism. (Indeed, the biggest opponent of these latter things was the Catholic Church, hardly a standard-bearer of liberalism.) America, which is usually considered to have been the most liberal major country out there, had a decades-long programme of ethnic cleansing directed against the Indians, was one of the last Western countries to abolish slavery, and had an elaborate legal and cultural system of discrimination against black Americans until within living memory. There was a period of a few decades in the late 20th century when “Look at the content of someone’s character, not the colour of their skin” was the prevalent view, but with the rise of identity politics this sort of colourblindness is ailing fast, if not already on life support. More generally, I’m not sure where the meme that integralist societies will inevitably collapse due to religious infighting comes from. I mean, I guess it’s true that all socio-political arrangements inevitably break down, but if you take a serious look at Western history I think it’s difficult to argue that integralism is inherently less stable than liberalism. Integralism was the norm in Europe from the late Roman period (and arguably earlier, if you count the old Graeco-Roman poleis with their civic cults, but I’ll stick to Christian integralism because that’s the form under discussion), began to decline with the rise of Protestantism, and finally ceased to be normative some time in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So, that’s a period of about 1500 years in which integralism was the normal way for Christian/European/Western polities to be organised. As for liberalism, the USA is normally considered the world’s first properly liberal state, although if we’re taking a strict definition of liberalism as “The government has to be (as far as possible) completely neutral between competing religious and moral views”, then even the US wouldn’t count until the 1960s. Either way, however, liberalism has been the norm for far less time than integralism was, and is to all appearances already starting to collapse. So I’m not sure that there’s much justification for the idea that liberalism is more robust than integralism. As a final point, I don’t even think that liberalism is necessary to preserve order in multi-cultural countries. Arrangements like the Ottoman millet system, Dutch pillarisation and Swiss localism seem to have done a good enough job at maintaining peace between different religious and ethnic groups, for example; conversely, liberalism has only had to deal with multiculturalism for several decades, and already the prognosis for long-term success looks poor.

“The original Mr. X”

[arrogantwerpen]

sometimes i wonder how you guys would react to the Pillarisation from back then

[mercurialbadger]

Cute, nyah.

That’s your move? Like, do you guys really think yourself to be my intellectual equals?

Let’s keep this charade up for two more posts, I like how my texts read when I feel insulted, and they make me do research on topics I have lost my grasp on somewhat.

Not a single thing you quoted or posted has to do with degrowth.

Re~eealy? Did you forget how environmental, ah, activists killed lead scientists involved in production of БВК protein mixture from crude mineral oil, because it “insults the nature of Baikal”? Did you forget how degrowth people cheered for “evil soviet industry” leaving “free Ukraine”, or whatever the shit, only for it to result in the current “livestreamed people juicer with professional comedian leadership and comments + free advertizing space for Raytheon and Almaz-Antey” situation? I don’t even think they comprehend their responsibility. Minds too dulled.

Or maybe I [and by “I” you should understand Lenin] have said something wrong about how with monopolistic growth efficiency grows supernomially? Or about how there’s no magical ‘pre-human’ state of this world, which was created by human thoughts? No? I am waiting for you to provide your blue truth, I have given you my red. (Try beating me in my legend, child of sated times)

What’s worrying is not just that you’re unfamiliar with it

I have been present when Fridman roasted Meadows to a wonderful golden color so sought for in onion after the latter’s lecture on his Limits of Growth where he outed himself as a lukewarm liberal. I am not “familiar” with degrowth maybe, but I have been in the firing squad when it was executed for its crimes, nyaa-ha.

it’s that you’re willfully claiming deindustrialization is the cornerstone of degrowth

Look, if degrowth proponents claimed sensible things like getting tertiary education to 100 percent, increasing industry capacity 100-fold by making youth enter industrial plants en masse, making per capita electrical power consumption 100 MW*hr/year (approx. 12 kW per person), or getting world’s population to 100 billion, I would’ve been happy to support it. They don’t! They keep reinventing pillarisation without accounting for how pillarisation might be sabotaged. They make it all so peaceful without blood flooding the streets, and it is just so boring and idealistic. Where would you get kitchens for your every city communal kitchens? Rice and other grain?

focus on the uneven exchange between the Global North and the Global South, 

...you do know that “Global North” and “Global South” are fake people invented by FBI to explain why World System theory is too hard to understand to shitheads? Like, these guys are very good at “Look, here’s an Alternative Concept!” and then hitting you with a mercury-laced brick.

the mass overconsumption of goods 

I think that even Meadows in his book admits that goods are underconsumed, even in “rich“ countries. USA in terms of quality textbooks is not much better than subsaharan africa, sweetie. Didn’t the six-eyed guy have an entire chapter on fictituous capital in his reading capital manual? Or are people still trying to read Hegel without a brain condom?

the hyper exploitation of colonized peoples and the environment

I have literally pulled a quote from Samir Amin on that one topic: hyperexploitation of colonized people is not the result of growth, but a result of capitalists not risking to create growth because they can extract surplus by less advanced methods. Capital, mortally wounded by the sica dagger of Great October, keeps puking its lifeforce out, eating more people to replenish it, and then puking again. Degrowth is simply a badly held poker face of it.

And, sorry, one more quote from people who knew better:

We cannot rely on favours from Nature. To extract them from it - that is our ultimate task.

- Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, from a preface to the third volume of his works.

Also, as a revolutionary, I do not care about climate catastrophe or human cost. Did we forget the “cool head” of the “Cool head, washed hands, fiery heart” equation? Or do you think Michurin or Dzerzhinsky were not efficient in ERADICATING HUNGER FOREVER FROM ONE SIXTH OF A LAND? As long as a single human survives during the fight for communism, no reason to stop exists.

Posting Lenin quotes isn’t going to change anything at all

Posting Lenin quotes is much better than whatever the hell you are doing on your blog. “More alive than all of the living”, you know. Also I am posting not only Lenin. Lenin just remains one of more eloquent modern speakers on today’s problems.

For, you see, capital abhors the ever-increasing excellence of Soviet Union. It can only see its own death in it, and every single time soviet people, no, adonim, exceed the highest possible value, capital paints it as being below the lowest possible, because it cannot comprehend that slapping a “dead” sticker of pure semantics onto a truly immortal deity of pure human, no, pure worker&peasant origin can only work for so long, and it has destroyed enough of good things for everyone so that the *sica* of Great October is in the hands of the Soviet Union again. Yeah, Soviet Union got stripped of all its population and territories, but once it made the earth itself bleed and won against the unbeatable enemy, and in comparison this is barely a hindrance provided by a cigarette paper sheet.

Many parts of degrowth are already championed by indigenous resistance groups, or have been a part of various revolutionary programmes for over a century. 

And many indigenuous liberation groups and nonbolshevik revolutionaries have showed their complete loyalty to Global Capital. I am not going to listen to class traitors, I have more important things to do, you know?

Like, to advance communism I have to commission a VTuber rig for myself and my sister, this is a task of global importance and I am mostly procrastinating.

I don’t even know how to comment you linking the Al Jazeera, the prominent proliberal propaganda production device. I opened the article, skimmed up until the point they quoted Naomi Klein, let out a groan and switched to reading materials science article I was putting away for some time.

So, like, there is some value in this trash, but it lies outside the trash bin itself, you know?

Also, for everyone advocating for "anticapitalist degrowth" or whatever the shit.

I guess it is already happening!