Dallas shooting: suspect killed by police wanted to 'kill white officers'

[Igel]

28. The only reason the "target on (your) backs (is) bigger" is straightforward.

You're viewed not as individuals but as a member of a group, a group that acts together, where the members are similar, and who protect each other against outsiders. Doesn't matter if this is right or wrong, it's the whole "you're a member of a group, not a person" way of thinking.

The only way that this guy would go gunning for white cops is if he viewed them not as individuals but as a member of a group, a group that acts together, where the members are similar, and who protect each other agianst outsiders. Doesn't matter if this is right or wrong, it's the whole "you're a member of a group, not a person" way of thinking.


Nationalism had to die for a few reasons. The first is that it divided nations. The group that acts together, where members are simillar, and who protect each other against outsiders was, under nation-state thinking, the nation. Americans stick together, French stick together, Nepalese stick together. It was a kind of ideal, seldom achieved in practice but it worked to unify large portions of the world.

The stongest vision for a united Europe will fail because it cannot do this. Those strongest supporters have a "European identity," but it's a weak one. No common culture, no common language, no common set of traditions or folklore to mark ground boundaries determined by "deep" culture. The best they have is a common framework for doing business with some official environmental values. It's not the Fs that unite, it's the actual values and modes of interaction (the Fs are food, fashion, folklore, and festivals, none of which are crucial to what really binds people in a culture). Europe lacks both common Fs and a complete set of core values.

The second reason nationalism had to die is that it superseded group identity. You can't be a loyal Polish-American activist if your loyalty to American is greater than your loyalty to Polish; you can keep some of the Fs, but that's about it. It ultimately required disposing of things that disunited us because, dang, somebody, the wrong somebody, might feel bad. At the same time, it created great political opportunities that rely on group boundaries and making sure that groups are so allied internally that they can close circles against outsiders. It aided and abetted seeing individuals as members of a group. The tension in a lot of thinking is between the natural assimilatory tendencies of immigrants and group members in contact with other groups, individualism, and fostering group identity--in a single argument a person will flip between insisting on being seen as a member of a group and as a free-standing individual, but if you talk to 1000 people you get 1000 different ways to square that circle. But the group-think has to die. Nation-states can work out inter-group treaties and contracts just fine because borders make fine demarcations. Communalism is just plain evil, and leads to Rwanda, Indonesia, the Congo, Jugoslavija. White supremacy is just one kind of communalism, where skin-color is a marker for deeper values, and has all the same features of other subspecies of communalism. A great example of a communal set-up is Lebanon. That's a sucky example to want to follow.