Sunday, July 15, 2007

Neo-Tribalism (Is) For Dummies

Oh fer chrissake.

Metafilter

Wikipedia

Even aside from the fact that tribalism is one of the great forces for evil in human history, and aside from the fact that this alleged movement apparently takes its inspiration from Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, possibly--by which I mean almost certainly--the worst book I ever read (and this includes The Deathworms of Kratos), this is a damned stupid idea. Many folks seem to have too much time on their hands.

[Clarificatory addendum:
It's not dancing around the fire and singing ooga-booga that's angrifying. Hell, that's fine. But the bit about developing idiosyncratic customs, forming little tribes and all of that... Jesus, it's just nationalism writ small. Tribalism is just conservatism on steroids. Put me down for cosmopolitanism over this kind of turbo-communitarian crap.]

3 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

I just can't bring myself to waste my time reading about it.

8:51 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Smart man.

6:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The thing is, writ small makes all the difference. Scale is a massive part of the issue here and things change greatly when you're talking about something on the scale of 200 people vs. 300 million. It's not a trivial thing.

8:37 PM  

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