Modern slavery question

[zazen]

12 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That is Zionist ideology. Which is stage Blue nationalism.

Yes, the West is very bad at handling terrorism, which requires development beyond the West.

12 hours ago, Emerald said:

@zazen

It isn't just Zionism. That's just the Stage Blue reasoning that's used to get Israeli Stage Blue people on board with the barbarisms of the US and Israel.

You need a story to sell barbarism to the people so that they can rationalize to themselves why it's okay. And Zionism is just the wrapping paper that's being used.

It's similar to how the US used the idea of Manifest Destiny to create a pretty narrative around Native American genocide. That way, the average people could romanticize it and support it without focusing on the reality.

The US also did the same thing with slavery and created a narrative that black people were 3/5 of a person and needed the white masters to civilize and employ and help them through giving them work. This enabled liberal-minded people of the time to rationalize to themselves why slavery is okay.

There's always a narratives you have to feed the people to get them on board so that they don't have to question their own goodness and so that they don't challenge the state's agenda. 

But the people in the government are typically focused on maintaining power and control. And they may use the stories to rationalize their evils to themselves. I'm sure that many people in the Israeli government truly are 'dyed in the wool' Zionists.

But I have no doubt in my mind that the US and most of the government officials aren't the slightest bit interested or invested in Zionist ideology.

Though, they'll pretend to it to convince Americans that they just care about "securing a homeland for Jewish people" and "fighting antisemitism" or the variety of ways they justify it. But that's just to justify it to the people.

The US and Israel have other power-based imperial agendas... which likely have to do with taking control of trade routes and interrupting the potential formation of an Arab empire (of many nations with a common tongue) by having an American ally right in the center of the Middle East.

And the interests of the US are national defense, acquisition of resources, and maintaining it top imperial status... not Zionism.

Great post and writing Emerald. I agree.

Iraq, Afghanistan, countless coups, mob behavior in dealing with and threatening the ICJ or even Tik Tok by extortion of a fire sale to Western oligarchic hands, including so much more - can't be pinned solely on just Zionist ideology. In fact, even Zionism can be argued to be a Western implant itself - led largely by Ashkenazi Jews of European descent, carrying the ethos of Western conquest and colonization into the region. That contrasts starkly with the coexistence historically practiced by indigenous Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

That further reinforces the point that the West’s ethos hasn’t fundamentally changed and that our development has been lopsided and one dimensional. The distinction between material and moral development can't be overlooked. We can develop horizontally in the material, yet lack in the vertical dimension of ethics and morals - in our dealings with others. The development of skills and systems honed for material accumulation can far outpace the commensurate moral development that would use that newly gained power in a more just way.

The US’s full throated support for Zionism reveals a level of complicity that Spiral Dynamics can't excuse. The idea that development is linear - moving from stage to stage like levels in a video game - is a linear Western way of thinking which is a bit too reductionist and simplistic. It’s the same mindset that gave us "manifest destiny" which Trump literally invoked yesterday - blatant imperialism that further reinforces the idea that the West hasn't evolved in its character or domination driven ethos since its Paganistic roots in Europe, all the way through its colonial days and now deep into its imperial era. Materially bloated, but morally and ethically anorexic. 

Spiral dynamics can too easily let the US off the hook by claiming it’s acting at a "higher stage" when it’s clearly operating out of a lower stage and by lower values. Ironically, it achieves material gain through the lower values of exploitation, subjugation and domination, then retroactively claims to have gotten those ill gotten gains due to its higher values that others are lacking or behind in. The West acts as if it introduced these values to the world, that it brought the world into the ''1st world'' era to play by ''1st world values'' - never mind the appeal of these universal values that have had ancient civilizations and cultures aspire towards them from way back when. The West definitely institutionalized and systematized them, credit where credit is due - but they have also weaponized them as a veneer to mask their imperialist underbelly and hypocritically finger wag everyone else for not embodying values they themselves don’t.

The tools have changed, but the core behavior remains the same. Acting like Hulk in a suit, smashing and dominating the planet. And what good are the tools if the user of them is sloppy in their wielding - even dangerous in their wielding. Spiral dynamics basically boxes, labels, and ranks development into neat little boxes - which can then be used to explain away power imbalances by claiming it’s part of some grand evolutionary process we just need to move through - and that the West is so clearly ahead in that very process which is a notion that falls under scrutiny.

 

Edited 3 hours ago by zazen

[zazen]

Check what Jordan Peterson has to say regarding others ''wealth'' and resources below, time stamped 36-37min.

''It isn't necessarily the case that the denizens of the Islamic world look to progressive Western democracies as the ideal, but that turn out to be a problem if you're importing them on mass because their fundamental predisposition might not be Democratic and yet they're in a Democratic Society. 

So it isn't obvious what to do about that okay, the next thing I would say is it's pretty bloody easy for the rich Muslim countries who are absolutely awash in I would say undeserved oil money to moralize about the superiority of their culture, I mean the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia were a little fringe tribal cult before the West stupidly dumped a trillion dollars on them and allowed them to propagandize the entire world, they would have been a backwoods Arab tribe lost in the desert forever if it wasn't for oil money, we're unbelievably naive on that.'' - Jordan Peterson

This is a imperialist mindset. The same way ''BlackRock Inc, the world's largest money manager, warned that so-called "resource nationalism" was on the rise globally, threatening to undermine investment in sectors where governments were playing too heavy a hand.'' (https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/blackrock-sees-resource-nationalism-a-threat-to-mine-investing-idUSL3E7LO3GH/).

Imagine that, the audacity for a country to claim sovereignty over its own resources. According to JP, that's undeserved you see - a mindset underpinning and in line with the predatory parasitical nature of vulture funds born in the West, but who have outgrown their national nests and now spend their adolescence feasting on other nations. When those nations are now rising up and hip to their game, kicking ex colonialists out -  its no wonder the US is now turning inwards towards dominating its own hemisphere or even its allies in Europe which it has used as a pawn to poke the Russian bear.

People probably won't watch videos longer than 20 min so here are two shorts of this guy rebutting JP's remarks (though the full video is well worth a listen):

No country can develop internally when its external environment is constantly destabilized - it’s like building a foundation on quick sand. Imagine your a nation with 100's of millions of mouths to feed and lift out of poverty, the wound of the century of humiliation is still tender and healing, which the British empire heavily inflicted on you (opium crisis). They have now passed the baton of dominating imperialism over to their Atlantic cousins who you have witnessed destabilize countries around the world. They claim everyone should be a Democracy just like them (lol) but you have seen them use the permeability of Democracies to interfere and subvert the very notion of the word itself.

This is a serious undertaking. Of course China or other nations are going to be wary of opening up and allowing access to hostile agents which are so clearly visible. But libertarians and liberal purists will cry ''freedom'' and ''rights''. Meanwhile in Western lands they have none of this with regards to actual matters with gravitas - such as economic freedom, rights to safety, or to a decent health care system in the US. You're given freedom in trivialities - pronoun yourself how you want, stream porn 24/7 and fry your brain on games - but China are so evil because they regulate the toxic habits of their citizens for their own good. Maybe they actually care about the well being of their citizens. According to populists ie the popular sentiment ie democracy - Western leaders are viewed as having contempt for their citizens. When their own people vote against the establishment, they are referred to as populists (implying a negative connotation), but when the popular vote goes in favor of the establishment - the establishment call it democracy, funny that.

Again, this is the issue with Western absolutist, binary thinking. It can't think of freedom and rights in 3d, holistically. It can't fathom the restriction of lower freedoms for the higher freedom of safer streets, stable politics, and economic progress that doesn't swallow the masses. When we force feed our own people with notions of liberty, freedom and human rights - and in the most simplistic of ways - they stumble over themselves in contradictions. Liberals are so attached to the label and their incomplete view of liberal values - that they can't integrate the idea that it's more conservative values that even allows liberal values to exist. That we are biologically conservatively (nature-form) yet spiritually liberal (nurture-formless). That liberal values are incapable of defending themselves without elements of conservatism (survival) -  and that its not so back and white, because life isn't so.

Because the West has lost the transcendental, its people get bogged down in trying to fill that void by putting themselves into neat political camps and ideologies (to feel a sense of belonging that is natural for any human to long for, and that the material obsessed, individualistic and imperialistic ethos of their civilization has robbed from them). This is found in every domain  - from food (vegans vs carnivores) to political systems (socialist vs capitalist) to geopolitics (with us vs against us).

Even if the West does practice justice, equality, and human rights domestically, it blatantly fails to extend those principles when it comes to dealing with other nations. So of course, it's the most natural response to deflect away from how the West deals with other nations and instead point fingers to how those nations deal with their own people - to imply that they are less developed. Because when it comes to the game of how nations relate to each other, it’s clear that the West is the clearest offender in abusing civil norms in dealing with others.

Ponder this: perhaps the West is able to practice certain noble principles domestically, and has the luxury to indulge them, only because of the unprincipled manner in which they have dealt with and still do deal with the rest of the world. Perhaps they are able to be Democratic at home (though they still fail to be so in healthy way) due to being anti-democratic abroad. Perhaps having immense wealth from exploiting foreign lands, allows for more stable politics at home due to enough pie for everyone. And to finish, perhaps this now shrinking pie (wealth) is actually what’s causing the derangement and polarization of politics itself. Because when everyone’s got enough to eat, no one’s gotta find a scapegoat to lash out at.

Edited 2 hours ago by zazen

[Twentyfirst]

@zazen I posted reaction videos on this interview in this thread in two different locations if you go back you can check them out

[Alex4]

My opinion is that the West is quite selfish and deluded (especially stage orange delusion), but still nowadays the West is the best place to live in all of history. Moreover, I add that this level of wealth and well-being has been achieved without enslaving the rest of the world. Precisely Europe and the United States have progressed more when they have desisted from imperialism and colonialism. 

There are deeper reasons beyond Western blame for poverty - like geography and historical context. Pinning everything on the West would actually give it more credit than it deserves. It's more complex than that simple narrative.

Edited 2 hours ago by Alex4

[Husseinisdoingfine]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Not as much, but still, girls doing OnlyFans are not sharpest tools in the box since it is not good for them in the big picture. Making easy money from sexual exploits is not a good career choice in the end.

What do you think of the movement to classify sex work as a legitimate form of employment, and phrases such as, "sex work is work", sometimes used by proponents of both feminism and cultural liberalism. 

[Emerald]

5 hours ago, PurpleTree said:

To me all that sounds quite ideological.

And not necessarily true.

Yes there was colonialism and so on and it’s part of the equation. There were empire everywhere. In Europe in Africa in Asia in Mexico and the Americas before the settlers.

But imo western countries got better living standards through innovation. You fail to mention that. 
 

The amount of innovation from some of the small European countries. The amount of nobel price laureates per capita. Japan for example was very colonial for a while. But imo they prospered mostly through innovation.

Can you name me countries that aren’t “barbarous”?

 

It's not an ideology. It's something that can be observed. 

And the reason why Western countries were able to innovate is because they had the resources and were able to free up enough human potential to make those innovations.

It's pretty impossible to do that, if you live in a poor country with few resources... and under the boot of an imperial power. 

But no, there are zero non-barbarous countries as humanity is not fully developed yet... but some are more or less barbarous than others.

And the most barbarous in terms of foreign policy tend to dominate on the world stage... but also confer a bump in the standard of living and access to resources for its own people. And this enables more human potential to be freed up and put towards greater levels of societal development.

Think of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

If you live in a place where the infrastructure is underdeveloped and there's little access to clean water... or there's no grocery stores... or you don't have access to a lot of medicine... or there's no affordable school in you're region... or your country is occupied by an imperial power... or you live in a place with an unstable government... ALL of the human potential will have to go to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Physiological Needs and Safety Needs).

And having to hyper-focus only on these bottom rungs, doesn't give a lot of opportunity to focus on Esteem and Self-Actualization needs, which must be collectively engaged for a society to move forward towards Community Actualization.

So, what I'm saying is that living in an imperialist nation enables its citizens to Self-Actualize more. But at this juncture in history and all times before it, the way that a populace gets freed up to pursue Self-Actualization and Community-Actualization is through these extreme imbalances in power.

And I have hope that we will grow past this with the development of new technologies, economic systems, and collective paradigms.

But we must all first become aware of how all the positive things that those in "1st world nations" have access to has come at the expense of people from other nations. 

It's at once recognizing that human development is a bloody and barbarous process with lots of human sacrifice of human will and human life... while also aspiring to something greater and more holistic.

[PurpleTree]

34 minutes ago, Emerald said:

It's not an ideology. It's something that can be observed. 

Not really.

First of all barbarous can mean brutal but also uncivilised. 
 

Again how is Finland more barbarous than Somalia?

 

37 minutes ago, Emerald said:

. 

And the reason why Western countries were able to innovate is because they had the resources and were able to free up enough human potential to make those innovations.

That’s also not sure. It’s not sure that if Somalia had those resources that they would have made those innovations and inventions. I’m not saying it’s impossible but we’ll never know.

40 minutes ago, Emerald said:

Think of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

If you live in a place where the infrastructure is underdeveloped and there's little access to clean water... or there's no grocery stores... or you don't have access to a lot of medicine... or there's no affordable school in you're region... or your country is occupied by an imperial power... or you live in a place with an unstable government... ALL of the human potential will have to go to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Physiological Needs and Safety Needs).

Sure. But that doesn’t mean you can blame it on outside forces. Maybe you could also blane it on their tribal nature, religion. Maybe some countries are just less able and willing to build good infrastructure, democracy, school system etc. Because they only care about the survival of their tribe or whatever.