Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts, or they are concepts that provoke needless violence. They find their own nationalities an embarrassment.
> Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts.
Big thinkers tend to live in wealthy, leafy areas where they don't have to worry about someone jumping over their fence, or appreciate the need for demarcation of land.
Same goes for people who are pro-immigration/pro-drugs/pro-construction - but just don't do it their affluent area.
I've been to plenty of Food Not Bombs events where people are being fed and the prevailing attitude was, "If there are people needing to be fed, let them come and we'll feed them." The same folks were handing out harm reduction supplies.
These same folks went on to figure out the logistics of preparing food. So no, I don't think it's at all axiomatic that the people who disagree with nationalism are necessarily affluent in the slightest. In fact, I've found most solidarity with refugees and anti-nationalist movements in the working class. The overall community of folks I saw ranged across income brackets -- plenty of software engineers, tech folks, trades folks, unemployed folks...
I think that when people say, "They don't really mean it" or "their principles wouldn't stand up if it meant a disruption to their lives", they are not aware of just how much work folks are actively doing every day to live by those principles and invite people in.
