@22 yes. exactly. the hard thing, the very hard thing, is to discriminate btw what is good and what is bad in a thing, rather than consign the thing as a whole as good or bad. the US is both a political formation that has perpetrated genocide, one of history’s cruelest forms of slavery, hiroshima and more. it is also history’s most successful example of transcending the conflictual nationalism that has rendered human experience a constant drumbeat of genocide, and threatens again to kill us all.

@22 i really love the famous Solzhenitsyn quote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

What is true of individual humans is true of human communities as well. We are complicated.

@22 i think @Daojoan’s “and” formation is right on. all these things are true, and to try to reduce them to one, a simple story, villain or saint, is to do violence to truth and to our capacity to act intelligently, constructively, as we go forward.

@candidexmedia Great! I'm going to write it up a bit more soon, but its a self-hostable service, backed by a postgres database, that watches feeds, determines when items are "finalized" in some sense, assigns them to subscription which can be one-post-per-mail newsletters, daily or weekly roundups, every-n posts, etc, and mails them out accordingly. The mailings are styled by templates you can modify or replace. I'm working now on documentation and tutorials. The code…https://github.com/swaldman/feedletter

@candidexmedia if you are interested in trying to self-host, i'd be glad to help. if you are less interested in that, would just like an RSS-tonewsletter bridge hosted, I'm glad to talk about that too.

@eyesquash condemning practical goods. DEI is great when it is about, in practical terms, making it easier and more likely that we integrate and collaborate in harmony. it is terrible when it does the opposite, when it distinguishes in order to label, judge, extol, and condemn in ways likely to heighten group difference and conflict. for any given practice, reasonable people can disagree. but overall, is the goal to destroy what has it has labeled an evil country, or to improve the country? 1/

@eyesquash multiculturalism is the greatest cosmopolitan virtue, and the United States’ greatest achievement. but the success of the US approach depended upon something like the melting pot metaphor, on the notion that people neither entirely give up their prior ethnic identities, nor cling to them unchanged, but recast those identities as open subcultures inside of a larger shared culture. 2/

@eyesquash a multicultural that labels the larger culture an evil to be defended against rather than a joint construction to share, that polices in the boundaries of cultural identities in the name of authenticity or indigineity or ability to discriminate the vicious from virtuous, oppressor from oppressed, is not in fact multicultural in practice but nationalist. 3/

@eyesquash far from cosmopolitan, it encourages the formation and strengthening and marketing (as virtuous against a putatively vicious mainstream) of an endless array of strongly clung identities endlessly in conflict, demanding adjudication and collective justice (even while in theory disclaiming collective punishment, of course). it drips with self righteousness even while it fans flames of terrible wrongs. 4/

@eyesquash as with DEI, for any given claim or practice, whether a thing genuinely serves a multiculturalism or takes up its banner only to make claims that render multicultural cothriving impossible is contestable. reasonable people can disagree. supremicists within dominant groups will take the kinds of arguments i am making to disingenuously label good practices as bad. 5/

@eyesquash but overall, is a set of practices likely to lead, in practice, to integration and mutual thriving or to policing distinction and provoking conflict? /fin

@22 You can yuck my yum (not really!) all you want, but we are probably going to disagree.

Immigration and assimilation had little to nothing to do with the United States perpetration of theft and genocide against Native Americans. That happened because land and resources were valuable, and so elites who run and disproportionately own the more technological tribe easily found excuses to take them. 1/

@22 There never has been, there is not now, meaningful population pressure on North America's land and resources. We could support Ygesias' aspirational billion Americans. The scarcities we face were and remain engendered by enclosure and unequal access to the fruits of our society and our continent. 2/

@22 America has had its crimes, but it really has also had its virtues. Indica's piece, like most of his pieces, is lively and insightful, but as you say also tongue-in-cheek, overwrought, overbroad, animated by a strange mix of fascination and resentment towards a United States that is maybe smaller in reality than it looms in the imagination of a writer always looking to place it in a smaller box. 3/

@22 You will miss a great deal that is important if you cede your understanding of history to an imagination of villains and virtuous victims dressed up in the conceptual frame of colonialism. Violent migration is a ubiquitous fact of human history, not a dividing line between the bad and the good. The United States has done a great deal of evil, but almost none of it has taken the form of traditional colonization. An analogy btw Belgian Congo and say, contemporary Egypt, is strained at best. 4/

@22 Despite the fact that the United States has never been "a democracy" (nowhere has, democratic is coherent as an adjective in degrees not as an essential condition of a state), it was importantly innovative in democratic and political institutions in the 18th and 19th C (and now suffers badly from institutional sclerosis). 5/

@22 It is simultaneously true that, until the 1960s, the United States was overtly an authoritarian tyranny to its citizens of African origin, even while it was by far history's most successful experiment in multicultural integration for all groups other than the one upon which it had prosecuted the peculiar institutions of forced migration and enslavement, with all the fear, guilt, rationalization, and mutual hostility that engendered. 6/

@22 America's multicultural successes in no way absolve it, us, of the horrific abomination of slavery and our continuing — well past 1965 continuing — inability across both sides of the Black/white divide and through all of our institutions to overcome the divisions and deformations that original sin (not our only original sin) did engender. 7/

@22 But neither do those sins annihilate the extraordinary fact that people from hundreds of ethnonational groups could simultaneously adopt an identity "American" while transforming but not ceding their prior identities, and live and work and build and trade together in remarkable peace and prosperity. 8/

@22 Americans are very conscious that ours is a racist country and it is, and we are. But travel almost anywhere else, and you'll find the racism is casual, almost innocent. Long before Kendi or Coates, we have been obsessed with smoothing the rough edges that come from consciousness of ethnonational identity. 9/

@22 Americans in everyday life, in non elite settings, are very uncomfortable about making generalizations like "the Germans are thrifty but cold", which are the lifeblood of ordinary conversation everywhere. We can feel that it is racist-adjacent. Outside of elite professional and academic settings (which have in this sense been Americanized), that sort of generalization remains ordinary and common throughout even liberal, modern, Western Europe. 10/

@22 An irony is that the United States is condemned for its strange new imperialism almost entirely on terms that its imperialism made familiar and aspirational to its accusers. 11/

@22 Notions that ethnonational generalization is a problem, that ethonational chauvinism is a social evil rather than the most ordinary fact of every society, while not American inventions, were universalized in aspiration during the postwar era because they were the values of the new hegemon, because it was so multiethnic. 12/

@22 The current rebellion against US hegemony, you will notice, takes the form of resurgent ethnonationalism, Germany for Germans, Russia's unique spirituality, syncretic "Whiteness" and paradoxically nationalized Christianity within the US itself. 13/

@22 As Indica writes, the US does indeed stand on a precipice of perhaps falling from the values it once developed, advanced, and imperfectly embodied. A White Christian nationalistic "America First" fascism is all too plausible. 14/

@22 But it sure doesn't help, and it does violence to accurate history, to fail to acknowledge that while there have always been elements of these terrible tendencies in the American polity, the tendencies that condemn and suppress them, that have sometimes eclipsed and outshone them so no one even needed to much bother to suppress them, also have a lively history in the American polity. 15/

@22 It is ironic, and not creditable, that inheritors of these virtuous tendencies, of these good values, that played a vital role in the American experience have taken them up so completely and dogmatically, under narratives so simple and totalizing and scolding, that their very stridency is helping to create conditions under which these best of values may be unable to thrive or even survive within the American polity. 16/

@22 Like conservatives who sabotage state action, then say their own arson proves that government just can't work, our highly educated and professionally competitive puritans will claim vindication, if fascism reigns, that White supremacy was always the root and lodestar of the American experiment and so it was always just a matter of time. 17/

@22 People like me, should this catastrophe occur, will never be able to prove the counterfactual. Yet it will still be true that these gulag triumphalists (because of course they, with me, will inhabit the new gulags, if there are habitable gulags rather than merely uninhabitable gas chambers) will be, and always will have been wrong, and will have played no small part in their own and the rest of our catastrophes. /fin