The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
Things get better, sometimes they get worse. Generally people are better off materially than they have ever been, but people do not change all that much morally.
> and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to the rubbish we are in right now.
So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal" phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example with the collapse of the roman empire.
Greed is part of what humans are. It's part of what destroys societies. Building a society that can survive human nature long term is an unsolved problem.
You sound like you expected that, after the end of the Cold War, we had a perfect society, and then we fell from a state of grace and ruined it. No, after the end of the Cold War, the pressure was removed that had been keeping us from acting on our worst impulses. Turns out that many of us were worse than we expected.
This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:
"The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape American culture"
There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.
> There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.
Culture war at this point is more than a decade old. It did not start with Project 2025. It started on the Internet.
Also, GP said people do not change all that much morally. That much is true. Organizations change fast. Societies change slower. The acted on rules are a combination of three, but it's important to be aware of the distinctions and the dynamics.
I'm not sure that makes sense to me; how do society's moral rules change (slowly) but peoples' moral rules don't/change little? I mean I can think of some isolated examples like pirating video content, but generally a society's moral rules reflect its constituents; where else do those rules come from, if not its people?
Culture. Humans have pretty stable moral intuitions about the basics - fairness, reciprocity, value of life; AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems.
In short: "theft is bad" is something people are born with[1]; "pirating media is bad" isn't; the former will be universal wherever you go, the latter depends strongly on who you ask[2]; the former is constant throughout history, the latter can change within months or years.
On a more general point, human society is the poster child of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" - there's a lot of ideas and institutions in our lives that are purely abstract, and exist only in the shared, social sphere. Things like money, rule of law, countries or corporations - they exist as long as people expect them to exist, but ultimately they can disappear overnight - unlike the more fundamental concepts like self-preservation or reciprocity, which are anchored in our selves.
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[0] - If it weren't, we would have much more trouble understanding or relating to the past; the saying is that the past is a foreign country, not that it's an alien species!
[1] - Or at least it's as close to innate as we can get.
[2] - And, of course, the progress of science and technologies that made this question meaningful in the first place.
My experience is there's also a fundamentally inborn notion of "fair price" and "fair pay" that people are born with, that they have to be educated out of to operate successfully in the modern economy. It's one way in which our system is kinda anti-human—it assumes a kind of game-playing that's seen as wrong by people, naturally, and you have to play that game or you can't succeed. "What the market will bear" doesn't feel fair to people until they're made to see it as fair.
Price is just a symptom or manifestation. People naturally see it as unfair to take advantage of someone based on a power imbalance or information asymmetry. So charging an excessive price or paying a starvation wage is just one way to take advantage, but there are other non-monetary ways as well. Attempts to impose "fair" price or wage controls by legislative fiat or cultural norms are doomed to fail because they don't resolve the underlying cause.
"AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems."
Not even close! Universalized morality (e.g., "stealing is wrong") is a product of the last couple thousand years, and it's only present in some modern humans. It is the foundation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.
I would think that the distinction lies in the time it takes to reach consensus. An individual person's moral values may change rapidly without the need for external validation. A book club may take a few weeks of debate over a heavily philosophical book to modify the perceived moral values of the group as a whole. But stretching large moral shifts across an entire populace would probably take more time and a more concerted effort to accomplish. New ideas or values need time to be sorted, whether they be picked up into the mainstream view or dropped into unfavourability.
Your quoted sentence is an example of a group of people who have no idea of how to run a country. They are using the uneducated voter to support an agenda that is mostly unconstitutional. We Americans, just like other countries with a rule of law, determine our own culture within those laws.
To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping, is against the New Testament principle of "live and let live". (another way to state this principle is: "Christian, mind your own business and stay in your lane.")
This doesn't really make sense. The Democrats mainly, but also Republicans, have been reshaping our culture using federal funding for many many years now, using rules associated with federal funding, decisions for where federal funding goes to (one clear example being museum and arts funding), policies handed down from Department of Education and other federal organizations and departments, etc etc.
I guess more people notice it now that Republicans are doing this so openly but the use of federal power to reshape our culture is a well established process.
Also what does live and let live get them, especially with the other side pushing so hard? A slippery slope to an immoral society.
Just to add a bit more credence to this post, I'd point to Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed" which is 30 years old and discusses the intrusion of the federal government in shaping culture from the perspective of the right over many decades.
I've noticed that left leaning individuals tend to view their philosophies as neutral and when the federal government exerts its power in continuance of these philosophies it is viewed as a neutral application of the constitution. The right currently sees what they are doing in exactly the same way, a neutral application of the constitution.
I actually think we have two conflicting constitutions at this point. The rigid written one we are all familiar with, and a more flexible unwritten one that is based on precedent, regulation, and legislation. The right tends to prefer the former, the left the latter. As an example I think Roe v. Wade, ended up being a part of this unwritten constitution which conflicted with the written constitution. You then saw this culminate in the Dobbs decision where the left thinks a right has been taken away and the right thinks it was never a right according to the constitution.
What you call an "unwritten constitution" is the fundamental idea behind common law, which is basically the default in majority-English-speaking countries. Outside the Anglosphere[0] the standard is "civil law", which means that the law is only the stuff that was actually written down and decided upon by the parliamentary body. Everything else is optional; you aren't forced to "obey precedent", but may "follow jurisprudence" if such rulings provide relevant argumentation to the facts of the case.
This isn't a left/right thing, it's a British/French thing. And being a former British colony, America is very strictly a common law country. That's why we even have to care about the Supreme Court at all. The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to. In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
So naturally, the Constitution always has an unwritten component; to get rid of that would be effectively making a new Constitution. What people are squabbling over is what should and shouldn't be in the unwritten component, not whether or not it exists. Originalism and textualism deny the unwritten component, but nobody is actually an Originalist or textualist. There's no historical justification for the people who wrote the Constitution to want a civil law interpretation of it. Remember, they were all British lawyers and politicians. What Originalists and textualists are actually doing is using their ideology as an excuse to overturn precedent they don't like. If they were really Originalists, they'd be shutting SCOTUS down.
[0] Sharia Law and Mao-style "We won't tell you what the law is" bullshit notwithstanding
My abortion example may have muddied my point more than it helped, sorry about that. Let me try to articulate it more clearly. I'm (mostly) not discussing common law as I am focusing on the federal level. Common law tends to be more of a state concept (except Louisiana). As the Supreme Court held in Erie:
"Except in matters governed by the Federal Constitution or by Acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case is the law of the State. And whether the law of the State shall be declared by its Legislature in a statute or by its highest court in a decision is not a matter of federal concern. There is no federal general common law. Congress has no power to declare substantive rules of common law applicable in a State, whether they be local in their nature or "general," be they commercial law or a part of the law of torts. And no clause in the Constitution purports to confer such a power upon the federal courts."
There are matters of common law at the federal level, but they're not central to my broader point. When I say "unwritten constitution" I am referring to a set of laws, statutes, customs, and judicial decisions which together form an unwritten constitution that are non-binding to future legislative efforts. The Magna Carta and the 1689 English Bill of Rights still make up a part of the unwritten constitution of the UK, although the former is mostly symbolic at this point. However, no parliament can bind a future parliament in the UK. So if they wanted to repeal the 1689 Bill of Rights they could do so legislatively right now. The major advancement of the founding generation was the idea of a written constitution, one that could bind future legislators - and technically the other branches - so that the constitution itself had to be changed through a separate process. In other words Congress cannot repeal our Bill of Rights right now, it would have to go through the arduous amendment process. So when I speak of an unwritten constitution I am referring specifically to the non-binding nature of the laws and statutes that make up a set of foundational rules for a society. The phrases "unwritten constitution" and "written constitution" are fairly old and unfortunately are a bit of a misnomer in what they actually mean.
> The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to.
That's actually a good place to start for an example. Chief Justice Roberts stated recently that "[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." This highlights my point fairly well. The written constitution, the one that cannot be changed through normal legislative means, makes no such determination as to what is or is not appropriate and merely grants Congress the power of impeachment without even defining what high crimes or misdemeanors means. What I would argue has become a part of our unwritten constitution is as Roberts describes, a set of appellate courts with specific jurisdiction where the appropriate course of action for an unfavorable opinion is to appeal. However, Congress can add or remove inferior courts and determine their procedural rules and jurisdiction pretty much at will. In other words this set of courts, laws and customs developed by the legislator does not bar a future legislator from changing it to something wholly different if they so desire.
Another example would be independent agencies under the executive which has become a hot button topic lately. Article 2 Section 1 states that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." However, for a long time now we have had independent agencies which were created legislatively with a certain degree of insulation from Presidential control. I would argue that this is another example of a part of an unwritten constitution that does not bind any future legislator. It's also an area of extreme friction between the written one and the set of laws, customs, and precedent that we have developed over many decades.
Hopefully those two examples are more informative as neither are really central to common law.
> In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
That deserves a reply far longer than I can provide here. In general while I see the utility of judicial review I would argue it doesn't make sense when it comes to disputes between the federal government and a state, i.e. the federal government via the judiciary gets to have the final word over what is constitutional when a state challenges the federal government over the constitutionality of some federal action. I would also argue that Marbury v. Madison was one of the first bricks of an unwritten constitution being constructed as for the most part everyone just passively accepted it, but it is not explicitly called out in Article 3. However, there are good arguments against this.
You cannot legislate mortality. Yes, federal power/funding is the norm, but not within the confines of religious control, which is what the Project 2025 is all about.
The so called slippery slope is a worn out trope from the 80's, that has lost all meaning under the current administration. This is why live and let live works, as long as we all obey the law. We have to realize the rule of law is for everyone to adhere to, it doesn't matter how hard either side pushes, the only other option is jail.
Yes, but their context is somewhat backward from the meaning in the 80's. Then it meant the danger of giving a little on any issue, fearful it would decay into chaos. Now the chaos is in "who gives a damn what anybody thinks" mode. (ala, Elon, the press secretary, JFK,jr and the rest of the cabinet.)
Absolutely true, the Constitution has to be the norm for society. Religious people, such as myself, must find a way to live within it. (easy for me, not so much for others.) The current administration, supposedly run by Christians, are far afield of their "lane", but don't seem to care. Your last sentence is the one that worries me the most, because of what the Project 2025 could morph into, meaning outside the parameters of the Constitution.
Honestly, the way I see it: The people behind the 2025 stuff etc have been on the "losing" side of the culture war since 1969.
And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just laying their cards on the table.
I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative ethos -- so I feel like I have seen this narrative play out over a few decades ...
After the legalization of gay marriage they just collectively lost their shit. They see the stakes as being incredibly high. They see abortion as straight up murder. Winning the 2016 Trump presidency and taking over the US supreme court gave them a taste of blood, and a sense that they can finally reverse what they see as a profound descent into degeneracy. The trans rights stuff over the last few years has them totally incensed, as its a full-on assault (to them) on the ontological reality of family, body, identity, etc. that they consider intrinsic and holy and fundamental.
I think they're full of shit, but that's I think how this world view shakes down. It's a war because they feel the stakes are incredibly high.
People on the right or in boardrooms of various companies that are aligning themselves with these people for what they see are strategic ends are playing with fire.
As someone who grew up in an evangelical environment, this is exactly my read as well. The problem is they might still be able to "win" via a sufficient application of violence, aka state power, despite being wrong and in the minority.
The evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn't believe in their god will be tortured by their god for eternity. There's nothing worse than eternal torture, so they see it as their moral obligation to do anything at all to prevent others from being tortured for eternity by their god. Nothing they do to others can possibly be worse than that, so as long as they're focused on saving others any actions they take are justified (to them).
Their god considers gay sex a crime worthy of eternal torture. So anything they do to prevent people from having homosexual encounters is morally acceptable, up to and including torture & occasional execution via "conversion therapy".
Anyone who truly believes in hell is either morally bankrupt & willing to allow others to suffer for eternity, or a dangerous monster who will stop at nothing to prevent others from what they see as sinning.
Many of them don't go to the extremes they would if they actually believed they were saving others from hell. They're full of shit. But some of them do, and they're fucking terrifying.
Which means either they don't really believe in the exercise of free will, or they don't believe God is in control of who gets saved (predestination). Either way, they're not acting according to their interpretation of scripture. Being saved for a Christian shouldn't be up to governments. It wasn't for the early Christians. It was an individual choice. They're acting more like Constantine.
The pushback against trans rights advocacy is quite interesting because unlike with same-sex marriage, there are several distinct groups opposing it for fundamentally different reasons. Religious conservatives are one group. Radical feminists, female athletes, medical whistleblowers are others. And almost everyone draws a firm line against accepting gender identity beliefs in their romantic and sexual lives.
Trying to redefine "woman" and "man", "female" and "male", "homosexual" and "heterosexual" - and then reengineering society by decree based on these controversial redefinitions - is going to get opposition across the board.
I think this is why it's become such a hot "culture war" topic, because it undermines the deeply-held views of many, many more people than just religious conservatives.
Take gay marriage for instance - this was fought both for and against on the basis of it being a same-sex union. But from the perspective of gender identity believers, if, for example, someone female merely identifies as male, then marries a male (who also identifies as male), then this is a "gay marriage" too. Despite this actually being a heterosexual pairing.
On top of this, where these beliefs have been forced into law and policy, it has caused actual physical harms. Women being raped and impregnated by male prisoners who identified their way into the female prison estate is amongst the worst of these. But lawmakers in states that have enabled this will claim it's progressive policy, somehow. Even though it's regressing back to over a century ago when mixed-sex prisons where commonplace and incarcerated women were at constant risk of sexual violence and exploitation from the men they were locked up with.
I dunno man, "citation needed" about a lot of your screed.
On the whole the freaking out about "trans" stuff is mostly a red herring or strawman used for strategic propagandistic purposes more than it is reflecting any real world problematic.
Making outlandish claims about how liberals are trying to do X, Y, and Z to their children's education or sports forces liberals onto the defensive forcing them to defend hormone therapy for 12 year olds or whatever when the actual number of real world incidents of this is vanishingly small.
I don't personally carry any kind of radical gender identity theory, but I care about the rights of minorities and it's none of my business what other people do and I see no problem with the public and corporate sphere accomodate pronoun usages or even bathroom accomodations, it's unlikely to cause harms and it doesn't hurt me in the slightest.
It's also somewhat ... interesting ... to bring up defense of female prisoner's rights and their conditions as some kind of demarcation point.
Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane prisons now?
> Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane prisons now?
> Because that would be great. But unlikely.
I don't know where I'm at on this, but this is ad hominem. You can't discredit an argument based on who's making it. If you're opposed to humane prisons, just say so. But that's not what I'm getting.
Why would you blanket care about the rights of minorities? I care about the rights of lots of beings, but not minorities for minorities sake.
The person isn't making outlandish claims. You can search the web and validate all of them.
Liberals, as in new leftists responsible for the majority of purity spiral shaming we've seen on the internet for oh the last two decades now, are in fact responsible for their fair share of extremist ideologies that some folks have now taken as self-evident. This is despite the fact that many of us who once considered ourselves part of their ranks are completely sick of its absolutist language.
I've been pushed into what I guess must be a kind of center because it seems we can no longer have any discourse of any nuance around issues like trans people without being labeled a fascist or maniac neo-Nazi right-winger.
To take an example of this, I have a very close friend who is trans but even she is sick of how faddish transness has become. She insists she's a trans-medicalist, something I only recently learned about, which seems to set the bar appropriately high to being what global society (not the ultra-left view that dominates places like HN and Reddit) deems a woman.
I actually do believe in biological gender and even think the fact biological women are out there bleeding and suffering once a month in ways men can't even begin to understand does in fact separate them from other people stating they are now a woman. Or literally growing a human being inside them is both a privilege and a horror that marks someone so indelibly we call this person a woman.
Yet I can no longer reasonably even engage most of you in a nuanced discourse about this without likely getting downvoted to oblivion. There was a time once when you could, but now it seems that time has passed.
And you have illustrated my point perfectly, even down to using air quotes to describe a relationship of my own. Did you intend to go further and perhaps call me something truly awful? As I am not "center" according to you.
I am able to maintain friendships with people I disagree with, even on very fundamental things.
You capture exactly the drift that has occurred in discourse, where neither side is able to talk to each other with any level-headedness, but remains fixed in escalation, certain the other side intends their extinction.
I think trans advocacy is interesting and different from gay rights because it goes beyond "live and let live" and is also an ontological battle. That is to say, it is a battle not just for equal rights, but over what people think, believe, and desire.
It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the libertarian arguments of gay rights.
The movement is is inherently cultural and poorly suited for adjudication the legal/political sphere. Courts and laws can't make people love, accept, or believe someone is a given gender.
Maybe you're too young to remember when "gay rights" was also an "ontological battle" ? -- a huge a fight over whether such an "identity" was anything other than a fundamental deviance, and a lot of rhetoric to the effect that it violates "natural order." It wasn't just theological thing from Christians, it came from the mainstream of society.
Some people still speak this way in North America but it is fringe. It wasn't fringe when I was a kid. It was the expected way of thinking about sexuality.
In the early 80s at least there was only two "mainstream" ways to talk about homosexuality, as far as I can recall:
1. what happens in people's bedrooms is none of my business, just don't talk about it in public and expect tolerance, or
2. this is total deviance and a mental illness and needs to be cured. (Oh, and they
deserve HIV for such unnatural behaviour.)
That changed, but only in the 90s/2000s, to an understanding that homosexuality itself is "natural" ("born this way"), and the so-called iron-clad laws of natural behaviour were "allowed" to include homosexuality. And even gay marriage.
Appeals to laws of nature and assumptions about what is natural mask ideology, and often look completely ridiculous 50 years later.
I remember the nature vs nurture debate, and always disagreed with it. I think it pigeon holed and disempowered the gay and the queer community for decades. I think it overstated the science, and understated the value of human autonomy.
That said, the battleground was about what they could do, so a live and let live compromise was possible. Gradual acceptance followed and continues increasing today.
With Trans, there battleground is belief, and even more critically, identity. Accepting homosexuals didnt require people to redefine themselves, their own gender, and that of the one they are attracted to. Self identity is incredibly important to people.
Conservatives present it that way, but I haven't seen that in practice. The majority of trans people are perfectly happy with people believing whatever they want as long as they treat other people with respect and don't discriminate against them.
I guess it really depends on the space. The trans debate is happening online in an extreme way that simply wasn't possible during gay rights movement of the 90s and early 2000's.
I agree that most of my trans coworkers and acquaintances seem satisfied with being treated the respect I give anyone, and keep any unflattering thoughts to myself. Meanwhile, there is a contingent of zealots on reddit that call me a bigot if I dont want to date a trans-woman or think biology should be considered in sports. Is that discrimination?
What is discrimination? Is it any delineation in treatment or perception from a cis-gendered person?
I have given a lot of thought to the topic because I support others having personal autonomy, but place value on my conceptions of gender.
> It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the libertarian arguments of gay rights.
No one is forcing you to date someone you're not attracted to.
I find that to be an extremely common argument against trans ppl. It's very similar to the whole gay panic thing. I was surprised when I realized how worried some cis men were about being "tricked" into sleeping with a trans person. As if there are so many trans people and as if all of them want to get into their pants.
> It's very similar to the whole gay panic thing. I was surprised when I realized how worried some cis men were about being "tricked" into sleeping with a trans person.
Most of the time I see the argument that people feel pressured/forced to date someone they're not attracted to it's not about men being "tricked"
I have no comment on what your professor said, but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist. Optimistic outlooks are too often met with a kind of reflexive dismissal or despair in a "I feel like things are really bad right now, have never been this bad before, and thus can never improve" diatribe.
There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed, but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more realistic than optimism.
The cynicism comes from the fact that many people (including me) have decided to check out from what is going on in the world and instead focus on what we can control in our daily lives.
It also comes from the fact that in many countries the social contract is broken.
You are still expected to pay your taxes but the services provided are increasingly of bad quality such as schools,hospitals, judicial system and so on.
So much so in fact that it seems to me that this relationship that the people have with the state is becoming more and more one sided. Like in an abusive relationship of some sort.
Look at the number of people who don't bother to vote anymore because at the end of the day it does not make much difference to their lives.
There is profound sense of injustice in the world at the moment but it is being swept under the carpet.
Part of the problem is the whole "In the long run, we're all dead" thing. If things are going to be bad for the next 30 years, that's most of the rest of my useful life. If my life leading up to this point was miserable and the rest of my life is going to be as bad or worse, then I'm not sure I care how things will be in 200 years.
> but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist.
Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away. The instincts still need something to work with even after all the real threats are gone.
It's just that people today only care about the next 20 or 30 years. They don't really care if, over the course of the next 200 years, two nations can rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.
I'm at the age where 30 years may well be the rest of my life (even assuming a fairly normal old-age sort of death) and 50 almost certainly is, so while I do care about what happens after for my kids, they'll also be quite old by then, so "the whole rest of your life during which you're still significantly active, plus all of your kids' lives up to as late as late-middle-age, by which time they're firmly set on their life courses and family planning and such, will suck" is... pretty bad.
> rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.
Maybe this was your intention or maybe not, but this is kinda what I'm talking about. It presupposes that there will be nuclear exchanges and annihilation in the first place, because, well, why wouldn't there be? Life is shit, tensions are high, and that's the grim dark end we all see coming anyway?
I love a low effort circle jerk as much as the next online commentor but let's be real here, nobody who's worried about stuff lower down the pyramid of needs can afford the luxury of donating resources to a hypothetical future.
"Fine"? Did the history professor consider anything other than history or politics?
The way global warming and our general destruction of nature is going (not just species or climate but also e.g. depletion of groundwater in a lot of heavily populated areas), I'm not sure democracy will be our biggest concern in 200 years' time.
No, he did not consider things that have never happened before.
He can only extrapolate from events that already happened. Human made global warming is a first time, so difficult to say what will happen from a historical perspective.
Human-made global warming appears to go back to the advent of agriculture, though, so for all intents and purposes it has been a constant throughout the history of which we speak.
Oh, coincidentally, that is just the time window of the technological singularity.. where we either ascend to a peace- & powerful interplanetary civilization - or accidentally eradicate ourselves out of a collective lack of wisdom and sense of connectedness. Let's play..
> It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.
What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation.
Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really wouldn't be that optimistic.
What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.
There is a problem with this though. It is the price paid in exchange for democracy. Take Syria for example. It took huge human loss to free itself from Assad, Iran and Russian influence. Is the price justified? Of course in the long run autocracies fail. The lifespan of the ruler is one duration we can associate (Putin is on the verge of death). But the damage can often be very significant and take generation to undo. Just to be clear, I was very much in favor of removing those murderers. I just wonder if there were ways to mitigate this (here, EU and US should have stepped in, which they failed to do. However, they are doing it in Ukraine, which is great)
I disagree with that assessment. It is currently led by someone widely popular in Syria. Ultimately, the people are free to elect whoever they choose. The point is it is unequivocal most of them rejected Iranian and Russian influence and a barbarous Assad regime. Of course rebuilding will take time, and there might be some extreme factions (religious or leftovers from the Assad regime). But freedom prevailed. Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
This is not an assessment. It's the truth. Jolani is a former al-Qaeda member whose organization is still considered a terrorist organization. The US even had a prize on his head.
> Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
You response to an opinion that is different than yours is to insult someone who is willing to engage with you. If you are not interested in debating, no point in commenting.
I do not think we have enough historical evidence for such an extrapolation. Human societies have been getting more and more complex, necessitating more and more complex governance. We are at a point of crisis, where the electorate is supposed to decide through voting, and our elected politicians are supposed to decide through legislation, on topics that neither the electorate, nor the elected are able to fully understand. It is not clear to me that democracy will triumph.
Sure we do. Go read H.G. Wells "The World Set Free". It's pre WWII, covers these exact topics, and could have been written yesterday. When it was written none of the problems were new.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
That's a non sequitur. Just because human societies have been getting more and more complex doesn't necessarily mean we need more and more complex governance. We might be better off with radically less governance, and just accept the consequences that sometimes bad things will happen due to lack of governance.
The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
> It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP replacement protocols years back that were being developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
> It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
It doesn't have to get worse. Conversely, it doesn't have to get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone in some random point in history because there are too many outliers on both ends of that one.
Well, WWIII or some other form of nuclear strikes may change that perception.
I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy, inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target, each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.
What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I strongly prefer not to.
I think that sort of analysis ignores the things that we gave up to get our golden age; such that a return to normal would actually mean ending up worse than we were before in many ways. We accepted Capitalism's race to the bottom in exchange for the benefits of consumerism. Now we are being asked to give up consumerism but there's no indication that we will also go back to a time before everything was cheaply made plastic crap.
An oxymoron if I ever heard one. To become rational means letting go of fears (to a large extent). I fear that one reason we fail to act is that we are guided by fear. Fear makes us focus on the wrong things. And I fear that in a civilized society fear becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Fear makes us obsess about the problem and how to avoid it in the very narrow and short term. It doesn't make us very good at long term planning and execution. It's an instinct that is evolved for animals that want to avoid predators, not for civilization builders.
Building a civilization requires vision, big plans and the feeling that we can afford bold ideas. We need to take risks. But how can we take more risks when we're constantly afraid of the future? How can we build a better future when all we do all day is imagining the worst possible future? If our minds are constantly occupied by dystopia we can't plan for anything else. So that's what we build.
I'd argue we evolved to think rationally in order to specifically advance our instinctive drives, rather than the "Triume brain" view of the neocortex and lizard brain fighting for dominance. Immediate and extreme danger enforces a realistic and calculating view of reality, when otherwise people tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with a danger.
Courage is the ability to choose an alternative besides first choice of fear. But it isn't necessarily rational either, more likely a different instinctive motivation winning out. A completely emotionless person, meanwhile, would probably be completely nonfunctional.
As I see it, Optimism is usually unrational but drives change and Fear kills optimism.
Trust is not purely rational its emotional. Fear kills trust, making you more rational in the sense that you assume other players are rationally adversarial.
As I see it, pessimism is as "unrational" as optimism. There's a big span of uncertainty about the future that is filled by our intentions and beliefs. If we commit to a pessimistic worldview we are likely to make some decisions that lead towards such a world. If we commit to an optimistic worldview we are likely to get exploited by bad actors.
We have to be able to juggle both realities. That is rational.
(But I think we are essentially saying the same thing here.)
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Excellent book on the theme using Zambia in the 70s as a case study:
Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to a prolonged period of sharp economic decline. [1]
"From now on, it's just down, down, down..." sighed one informant (p. 13). As Ferguson argues, "Zambia's recent crisis is not only an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way people are able to understand their experi- ence and imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatical- ly eroded" (p.15). [2]
The key argument I read here is that, due to specialisation, academic
philosophy is currently unfit to apprehend today's problems. It is no
longer capable of incorporating politics, and politics itself has
escaped rational discourse. Historians are enjoying some new
limelight, and popular value-revisionism is in the air, at least if
Lucy Worsley's BBC series is anything to go by.
"Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation."
"Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philosophize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of the divine substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams."
“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or https://dailynous.com).
The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically ridiculed for even attempting to do so.
And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris, talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too niche and far into his own entertainment career.)
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social milieu.
The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is
broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry",
an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human
progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional
science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle
accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing"
and fraud - or radical populist individuals and small unaffiliated
groups of thinkers able to operate without material resources. The
Goldilocks zone of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical,
"high-risk" enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the
21st century.
Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.
The traditional 3rd option was the patronage by a rich benefactor. The modern version is patreon. It's imperfect but seems to work pretty well for some.
Patreon is still dependent on the creator caring about what their audience wants, what the market wants, etc. This is a distinctly "populist" approach, which does have its downsides: specifically if there is important work that doesn't have a wide audience, or takes years to get any results.
The kicker is it's not really a dichotomy either. Academia and
industry have gotten closer together, colluding to decide what
research is funded and what is silently dropped, what is taught and
what never makes it onto the curriculum. This is even framed as a
good thing by governments who talk of academic-industry "alignment"
and how the academy "serves" industry. It's a way to get public money
for training that is a subsidy to commercial interests.
"Objective" higher education and research designed to shape industry
by genuine innovation is as rare as rocking-horse shit - mainly in
niche areas of physics or biotech that don't have any commercial
application yet.. but might one day.
I would like the idea of voting diplomas, but ensuring that such gate-keeping can evolve over time without being gamed to slowly strip a larger & larger fraction of the population of representation over time is a really tricky problem.
Thus, I think that the freedom to vote & to hold office should be enshrined in the constitution for everyone, regardless of criminal history or citizenship.
It would take a similarly isolated gov department to rate and set the difficulty. That one should probably not have a diploma.
That the system will be gamed is no real concern as that battle will continue forever. This version is at least capable of plugging the hole when enough people notice it.
The freedom to hold the generic office seems fine. For a specialized department some relevant experience and diplomas isn't a lot to ask. If unskilled employees could do a great job in any occupation we would see this in the private sector. I think it can just be left for judgement by the voter.
> China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.
An annoyance of mine is that this person is from Europe and seems to ignore that the UK[0] and France[1] are modernizing and, at least in the UK's case, expanding their stockpiles.
There seems to be a continental myopia towards the European role in adding to the problems of the world.
EDIT:
You can downvote me all you want, it doesn't make me wrong.
It’s a story of the unfolding of human progress told by an idiot, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing if you pay attention to what the idiot thinks is important.
All a bunch of narcissists who's whole MO is showing off how smart they can be with words, with net negative to society.
Literally if all the morally righteous smartarses from Marx to Hegel to whichever modern university-produced cretins had done the world a favour and died nice and young the world would be a far better place.
It altered voting intent by both Jewish and Islamic groups in ways which were net negative for Harris. The margin of error in voting was less than the number of votes swayed.
All of this is out weighed by the "didn't vote" but democrat didn't vote was larger than before. If this issue stimulated a vote boycott it could have affected democrat voters more.
That argument is not really credible to me, saying that democrats did not vote or voted republican because Harris (and Biden before her) were too favorable towards Israel, ignores the fact that it was glaringly obvious that trump would be even more favorable towards Israel.
I have certainly heard people say that they couldn't support Harris because the Biden administration was too close to Israel, so instead didn't vote at all. I know it doesn't make sense to hand the election to somebody objectively worse on an issue they claim to care about, but there it is.
I suspect that whole thing was driven by some clever folks trying to get Trump into power.
Trump was an isolationist in his first term, and his campaign used this to convince muslim voters that he'd continue this in his second term and withdraw support for Israel.
Instead, he announced a US funded ethnic cleansing campaign in the region, and the cornerstone of his budget is funding to illegally deploy the US Military in the US. One of their main goals is rounding up "anti-semetics" which seems to mean anyone that's against genocide, especially this exact group of Trump voters.
My suspicion is that they fell for it because they're less familiar with US politics, either due to a language barrier or due to being 1st and 2nd generation immigrants without grandparents that remember the McCarthy trials, or the US deporting jews back to Nazi Germany.
Whether Trump would continue it was an unknown. Whether the Democrats would continue it was a known. And they wanted to punish people who were supporting a genocide. It's a fairly rational choice. My entire family didn't vote because of this and the friendliness with Cheney and neocons.
Neutral I suppose. I think it was good that Democrats were not rewarded for supporting a genocide. No, Harris was a bad candidate in many other respects too, and even considering just this issue, I think it was the right decision.
I think this take comes from a place of western privilege. Biden has always been extremely pro Israel, more than even the average politician here. Biden refused to recognize the ICC war criminal ruling's on Bibi and Israel and also gave them whatever weapons they wanted. It doesnt really make a difference if Trump is more rude and annoying about it, neither of them like Alive Palestinians.
I mean, the whole thing went down under the Biden Presidency. If he thought getting those votes was important he couldve shut it down, it wouldnt even be the first time a president did that. Reagan reigned them in all the way in the 80s.
Some fantasy about how millions of leftists voters either boycotted the election or voted for Trump because of Biden’s position on Gaza. Complete nonsense of course, but it’s a popular conspiracy theory among certain democrats circles.
It was also funny to see democrats suddenly realizing that Arab Americans vote republican. They always have and they always will. Just like how Latino Americans, and generally most immigrants, will always vote republican too. Arab Americans are very culturally conservative. They would rather see a 100 Gazas than accepting that 2 gay men can get married.
The left pretty much falls into the same trap all around the world. Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning. The typical reaction is to fall back to elitism and claim those immigrants must be stupid somehow.
I don't think you mean leftists you mean liberals. Leftists ostensibly have a materialist understanding of the world, not idealist. Of course many immigrants are right-wing, the US exported counter-revolution globally during the 20th century.
I went to eat out at a Guatemalan restaurant the other day and they had a poster for a right-wing ultranationalist paramilitary group.
Is it shocking? Not at all. I have heard the same violent rhetoric from petit bourgeois in Colombia and in the USA because the exact same forces of reaction in the USA have been at work globally for decades.
> Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning
The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
> The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
Yes, agreed. I probably saved a few words too much on that sentence. I should have thrown a "some" or "many" in there. OTOH, as a non-native speaker, I will loose every argument that ends up in native-speaker pedantery, so I am kind of unimpressed.
I would appreciate a broader examination of how this site politics function because no one here seems to understand the difference between liberals and leftists.
This site is mostly wealthy and older who have benefitted from the neoliberal status quo. It's why many commenters can shrug off the insane shit happening like opaque deportations of random people to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador, it only affects people on the margins who they think they are very far removed from.
In wealthy urban areas there are a lot of liberals who don't have a materialist basis for their views and are hypocritical, so the more reactionary on this site think that these pearl-clutching libs are the end all be all of left-wing politics. Meanwhile actual leftists dont really differentiate between ethnic supremacists and YIMBY liberals because they both ultimately support the same outcomes.
I am also from a petit bourgeois background but being younger I think it was very clear that the direction we were heading in was not sustainable. There is no path that allows for me to have stable finances (enough money to buy a house and pay for my parents retirement) and also be spiritually fulfilled. The only way I can save up the money to take care of the people around me is to sell my mind, body, and soul to the machine (even then who says the current administration wont tank the stock market and erase all my savings). I think even for Gen X'ers this was the case, it was just easier to keep their heads down since the polycrisis was still a few decades out and would not yet seem "real".
Even as a relatively successful zoomer I have to walk a fine line of grinding away at my day job, and doing the community-oriented work that fulfills me spiritually. The market signals that stuff like home ownership and having a family is not "efficient", so I don't bother.
Anyways, there's a real disconnect and I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes. If history is anything to go by they most likely never will.
> I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes.
I think there are plenty of wealthy folks who understand the benfits of living in a more equal society, and that would gladly pay their fair share to live in such a society. The problem is they are not enough, and worse yet the middle class and what remains of the working class are actively pushing propaganda that goes directly against their own interests (perhaps because they think that one day they will too be millionaires).
Of course wealthy or "petit bourgeois" can be leftists or Marxists or whatever, they have typically made up the intelligentsia of most left-wing revolutions historically.
But the material interests of the wealthy align with the status quo that allowed them to acquire their wealth. This becomes less true as the "polycrisis" of climate change intensifies, since at some point there will be no future to enjoy, regardless of how much money you have.
Also I will argue that the reactionary propaganda comes from the top-down, not the bottom-up.
The wealthy are not trying to maintain the status quo though, they are actively trying to dismantle the remnants of the social/welfare state. I would argue that it is exactly that social system that allowed them to become wealthy, and they want to hold and hoard the wealth, stifling economic mobility and increasing the divide. This is stupid though as it increases social tensions and IMO puts them even more at risk of losing their wealth.
The reactionary propaganda does come from the top. Case in point: Elons “X the everything app” and him promoting afd - one has to wonder why he cares so much about immigrants. The answer seems simple, if they are not the target, he is.
> The wealthy are not trying to maintain the status quo though
I agree with everything you said, of course there are factions among the wealthy. Some want to keep doing business as usual liberalism, I think others anticipate climate change and want to pivot to a more violent system that allows them to horde even more wealth.
At the end of the day though, all factions of the wealthy have solidarity with each other when it matters.
I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.
I don't know what to tell you, I'm never going to be happy about people voting against my rights or about secret police disappearing people and ignoring the court system
You seem to be completely ignoring lynx97's actual point.
If you're not happy about those things, stop telling everyone who disagree with you how stupid they are and how they're literal Nazis. Then at least some of those who disagree with you on some issues will be less driven to vote for the people whose positions appall you.
Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.
> If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi
Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
No. Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist. In fact, thats the core of my criticism. Political views are a spectrum, and you can't just push someone to the far right just because you disagree with them. This black-and-white thinking is doing far more harm then you might imagine.
> Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist
Their methods and their positions make them fascist, not their support or lack thereof for opposing positions.
Say, a coup attempt. Or someone in power talking about ignoring term limits. Or getting bribes and favouritism for corporations (corporatism is a heavy component of fascism). Or silencing opposition with brutal and illegal methods (such as kidnapping in the middle of the night by unmarked and masked men). Those all scream fascism, regardless of the fact that e.g. the person in charge of healthcare is an antivaxxer.
> Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
Scratch a little deeper on the things popular Republican politicians and members of the current administration have been saying and promoting for the last few years.
Conspiratorial movements almost always end up at "it's The Jews", and so do theirs.
If you see talk about their opponents engaging in dark "rituals" involving child murder or abuse, you can be 100% sure you've found one that'll get you there. It's just blood libel, keeping reading and listening and you'll see that they're fully at that point before you've had to do much work. It's tedious.
sure this sounds bad, but we also currently have, in the USA, and administration who deports student protestors and does Nazi salutes. Ive been hearing about how "oh, the left just calls us Nazis for any opinion that differs from them" and now they are in power doing Nazi salutes. They were Nazis the whole time. No one is getting called Nazi for their opinions on tax rebates.
I agree, it's a huge trap. The right exploits leftists who insult normal people as dumb. It worked when they insulted George W Bush, who people identified with and found likeable, and was probably coached to bungle sentences despite likely not talking that way at Yale and Harvard; and when they insult Trump and his ideas, though he's perceptive and effective.
Many say it works because liberals now represent the professional-managerial class, who often come across to workers/poor as infuriatingly patronizing, slick and humiliating. Whereas many don't know who owns their big corporation, so they don't inspire such visceral feelings.
While some may argue that liberals aren't leftists (but are rather good-cop), nevertheless many leftists do this too. The dynamics are explained in Thomas Frank's book "Listen, Liberal", David Graeber's essay "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good", and Participatory Economics's coverage of the coordinator class.
Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, you'll never convince someone swayed by bumper stickers to read and thoughtfully consider your 500-word ultra-concise argument for it.
"Vibes" and populism drive voter behavior. Cheap populist messages will always resonate at least as well as even an ultra-simplified "it's all of us versus the owners of capital". Us vs. Them is what populism is, but getting the right Them according to class consciousness is really hard (and it'll constantly be at risk of someone subverting it to something else, probably "the Jews and other child-sacrificing Evil Cultists in their sway" because it's usually that for some stupid fucking reason).
Even Bernie had to settle for the shitty and inaccurate "the 1%" to get even a little traction with class consciousness on a mass scale.
Right now outright conspiratorial thinkers are ascendant and doing the usual thing of being some of the elites (the capitalists) we should all be against, while painting everything as the fault of other elites (how are they differently elite? Well, follow their stupid threads of "evidence" and you always end up at blood libel, truly, it's so consistent that it's boring)
> Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular,
well yea, and Marx is a taboo, nothing new there. Those ideas can be repackaged though, in a way that won't make people foam at the mouth because of the "communist sounding words" (thinking of gary's economics for example). I agree with what you said, it's easier to package an "Anti-something" message, as we see with all the anti-immigrant messaging in the US and Europe, the Anti-Billionaire movement still has not gained even a fraction of the traction though.
Well, I dont remember any "immigrants for the poor" movements. But I know from personal experience that Lions Club and Rotary people actually sometimes do something useful for the poor with their money...
Given that context, do you really not understand that you shouldn't bite the hand that might feed you?
Immigrants are never going to feed the poor and disadvantaged.
The oh-so-bad-and-evil rich people might at least sometimes.
Immigrants are a net positive contributor to the welfare and pension system in the EU, they are statistically very likely to be the literal hand that feeds you when you will be old and in need of care.
I never said rich people are bad and evil, just that they should pay their fair share. For their own good too, to live in a more harmonious society, but maybe this is better.
Let me expand a bit on this. I personally think it is a very bad sign for our society that we are about to outsource the responsibilities around caring for the elderly to (mostly) female workers from neighboring countries to save a few bucks. Personally mostly because I find the prospect of a language barrier in care horryfing. I don't want to imagine how it must feel for those we already subject to this treatment to be cared for by someone who barely understands your language. In that context I find it hard to feel cozy about the future of care being "solved" by using immigrant workforce. Regarding pensions, all I can do is hope the statistics you are refering to are actually true. The cases I know about are heavily blocked on the language barrier when it comes to finding a "good" job. The best positive example I can think of are construction workers where it seems to work quite well that one or two guys speak the local language well enough to translate/coordinate with the rest of the crew. But most other cases of immigrants I know are actually pretty much blocked on the language issue. Only some are talented enough to learn a new language fluently in a few years, and some languages are actually pretty hard to learn. I count me in on that group. If I had to learn a new language at my age, I would probably do very badly. I didn't even pick up enough spanish during a 2 month trip through south america to do any interesting conversation. It would probably take me years to be able to respond to a random sentence from a native speaker of anything other then english and my native language. You might be able to survive with just English in the tech industry. But in pretty much every other industry, especially service, it is hard to find a job without good language skills. So most of the examples in that area that I am currently thinking of actually ended up depending on the welfare state for income instead of contributing to the pension system.
Nothing to feel cozy about, that was just an example of how immigrants do in fact help the poor and disadvantaged. In the same way that you mention how working class jobs are now also increasingly done by immigrants. Now if the rotary clubs want to donate money that’s great, but the fact remains that there is a redistribution of wealth happening before our eyes, and the direction is not wealthy -> immigrants, it’s middle class and below -> ultra rich. We are effectively subsidizing the profits of billionaires, while they skirt taxes and lobby for cutting even more funding to the welfare system. The economic divide between the super wealthy and the ever fading middle class is increasing year by year. How is this supposed to function?
I think they don't fall into the trap, and their position on migrants is formed not from the assumption that migrants have leftist views, but from the assumption that it is easier to make migrants dependent. And when someone is dependent, it doesn't matter what cultural views they are inclined to.
This is, of course nonsense. The data is clear that Latinos vote majority Democrat, though it was a smaller majority in this election than the previous.
Citation needed. A lot of the Latinos I know in NYC voted Trump. A few were Democrat voters who grew tired of being insulted by Democrats who casually lump Latinos into a big "left loving Latino pool" when they are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chileans, Ecuadorians, etc; Individuals with distinct cultures and backgrounds. Latinos are also heavily religious which is very influential as well.
it was a huge anchor around the dem's neck, it was a huge conversation during the entire election. They were unable to convince people that Trump would be worse for Gaza than them.
When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024 were asked “Which one of the following issues was MOST important in deciding your vote?” they selected:
29% - [■■■■■■■■■■]
24% - The economy
12% - Medicare and Social Security
11% - Immigration and border security
10% - Healthcare
9% - Abortion policy
5% - Don’t know
So a country with 3% of the population of the US can throw the US into lawlessness or transform the US into a dictatorship? Pretty weak structure if that actually works.
It's more about how the US handled the situation in a country with 3% of the population and the impact of that on either marginal voters or voters for whom this was a major issue.
In this case, it wasn't for lack of action. The US is actively funding one side's dominance and hindering others from helping the other side.
I think most people who are complaining about this are not expecting the US to be responsible for anything and would be pretty happy if the US just sat out.
Looking at those graphs I think one sees a war started by the weaker force and losing badly. A genocide in the same way as a bully being smacked in his face is bullying.
You realize genocide has nothing to do with graphs? It has to do with the leaders of the army accused saying they want to use starvation of the civilians of their own country as a tool of war among various other things. Since Israel does not recognize any Palestinian nation, and is the de facto occupier of the land the Palestinians live on, they are effectively civilians in the Israeli state
The author collected the reasons why Americans did not vote and analyzed all the not-about-genocide reasons, topics deemed inappropriate for discussion were self-censored by the author
that's a very interesting phenomenon, in Westworld, the hosts defensively disregard any evidence that challenges their true existence to prevent their worldview from collapsing:
Genocide is a crime that consists of the combination of other crimes and a particular intent. Israeli politicians routinely declare this intent in mass media while they are committing actions that are listed in the description of the crime of genocide.
Russia has a tentative, informal truce with Israel on this issue, a 'you get atrocities in Palestine and we get atrocities elsewhere' kind of deal, and China aims to look neutral while supporting Israel for profit, e.g. in the Haifa harbour.
3% of israeli jews would consider it immoral to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip according to recent polls. It's a thoroughly genocidal society, as is obvious to anyone looking at israeli press and television. The israeli state is also very, very aggressive towards its neighbours, occupying parts of several of them, acting in breach of a peace agreement with another, participating in military exercises as a threat to yet another, and so on. It can do this due to US bullying of allies and enemies alike.
Soldiers in the IDF publicly admit to and document atrocities they're committing, voluntarily, which is well known and easy to confirm. I usually recommend looking through material collected by ytirawi and ireallyhateyou on xcancel.com, because it only takes a few seconds to start seeing photos of inexcusable acts and rhetoric.
> the genocide contributed to bringing Trump to power
Only because folks who refused to vote for Kamala said they could not stand her support of Israel policies :-) Like poor voters in the Midwest, you can always count on a certain electorate, to vote against their own interests and what they care about...
As if Israel was the only reason to not vote for Harris. I dont remember much of her "platform" that actually would be in my interest. Make-believe-minority-politics isn't for the masses.
to be honest i only remember the supposed $20000 subsidy for first homebuyers, but how was the alternative in your interest, and is it working out as expected?
That's just it though, the democratic and republican parties ran on Israel apartheid maintenance since the end of the second world war. And even in the face of a genocide, the democrats as a national party held the line and refused to consider the crime against humanity unfolding before them. How is electing them supposed to be taken? Should they continue to ignore human rights violations? There was no other way to signal to democrats, as they would rather lose to fascist dictators.
20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians with full rights. Some were killed 7/10. There's a muslim party in the Knesset.
Remind me again: how many black parties had representation in apartheid South Africa?
You are confused because Israel HAS A apartheid state: the settlements (a small part of Israel in total). But that's not the same as Israel IS A apartheid state.
If you can't separate HAS A from IS A you will fail your Object Oriented Programming 101 course, but no one seems to notice it when talking politics :P
The real Apartheid is not the israeli citizens. It's the people in the West Bank and Gaza. All of them should be israeli citizens too. Either that, or half a million settlers should get out. Can't have it both ways.
It's just settler colonialism. This is what it looks like, it's the same patterns and attitudes, complete with every act of resistance justifying further dehumanization and taking even more. Hell, the map of the West Bank even looks like it, it's just entirely that, top to bottom. The only difference is we're 80ish years past the point when nobody (except the colonized) minded if you were doing settler colonialism, so there's a little push-back.
> complete with every act of resistance justifying further dehumanization and taking even more.
"Resistance" oh please. Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization. DESPITE this Israel gave them Gaza to rule over themselves. What did they do? Steal from their own people, fire missiles weekly. And STILL Israel showed patience. There was a one-sided cease fire before 7/10, Hamas kept firing. Then after 7/10 the patience with Gaza came to an end.
As was suffrage, the bantustans were in large part a solution to the risk that voting would change the balance in the national parliament. What you could vote for and what the dominant group could do to your candidates was used to reproduce and reinvent apartheid, similar to how it is used in Israel.
Another similarity is that the dominant groups in both societies are propped up by protestant christians. Yet another is using colonial practices in other countries to fund the local economy, like emerald mines in Zambia in the case of South Africa and diamonds being a main export of Israel.
Legally Israel is engaged in apartheid, which is a crime. I'd argue this in itself makes the state of Israel illegitimate, i.e. armed and other resistance towards it is either a moral obligation or at least permissible, that is, the mainstream position of early liberalism.
That's all cool. But it's just standard deflection from the tens of thousands of deaths that the Biden administration directly enabled. And Arabs living in Israel doesn't magically make all the very public statements that Israel made (like that they wanted to level the city to the ground, and displace its population once and for all), repeatedly and throughout the entire Gaza operation just go away.
Israel didn't make those statements. Specific members of radical parties did. Imagine judging a country by their worst people. I bet your country would fare quite badly.
IDF generals did. Who else would you consider credible in representing what the IDF intended to do? Regardless I wasn't trying to make this about Israel's actions. But rather about what Biden (and didn't do) with Israel.
He didn't even go as far as condemn the radical parties that you mentioned. Absolutely no red line, or anything. Just complete carte blanche. Again, even Bush or Reagan didn't let Israel do whatever they want with no political repercussions. Israel knew back then that some lines couldn't be crossed without losing American support. With Biden, they did whatever they wanted, said whatever they wanted and took advantage of that.
Likud is a mainstream party in Israel. Their prime minister has been making genocidal and atrocious statements for a very long time. Mainstream television in Israel has been in overdrive to secure popular consent for absolutely obscene crimes for more than one and a half year.
80% of israeli jews in Israel approve of genocidal treatment of palestinians in the Gaza strip in the form of ethnic cleansing, while 14% believe the public statements about this from world leaders to be a distraction and 3% consider it immoral.
The broad israeli opposition, i.e. the large demonstrations in Tel Aviv and elsewhere and the politicians that support them, disagree with the government in which order to do things, not on whether the palestinians should be treated genocidally. They want to make the palestinians 'freyer', suckers, by signing any deal that brings israeli prisoners and hostages back and then continuing the genocidal process anyway. Meanwhile the government considers the prisoners and hostages better positioned in captivity, hence why they have been refusing negotiations, and then broke the ceasefire deal they went into earlier this year.
> genocidal treatment of palestinians in the Gaza strip in the form of ethnic cleansing
Well that made no sense. Genocide is killing people. Ethnic cleansing is moving people. Those are extremely different things. The entire Muslim world has already done a 99% ethnic cleansing of Jews, and where is the outrage? That's 10x the number of people that live in Gaza.
No, the crime of genocide can be perpetrated through non-fatal means, through "serious bodily or mental harm" as the convention puts it. Displacement, starvation, the eradication of homes and records, and so on, are common tactics applied by genocidal regimes.
The state of Israel systematically destroys educational institutions, libraries, archives, historical monuments and buildings, cemeteries, homes, hospitals, agrarian land, and more, according to leading politicians and pundits with the explicit intent to erase the palestinians from the land they're indigenous to. Israeli palestinians are called "arab" as part of this policy.
The ambition to establish a zionist colony and move the region's jews there caused a lot of outrage at the time, in part because the zionist movement had engaged in terrorism and other atrocities for decades already and wasn't exactly received as a welcome innovation in western antisemitism. It also came right after the influence of the previous innovation had subsided, i.e. nazi antisemitism.
US and british planes moved most of the jews from Iraq, Yemen and so on, so claiming that is was done by "the entire Muslim world" is blatantly false. In Indonesia the plight and flight of the jews was mainly caused by imperial Japan, who put pretty much the entire jewish community in labour camps. Today indonesian antisemitism is strongly connected to israeli atrocities and the antisemitic conflation of judaism and the state of Israel that zionists insist on.
Huh? I don't think it's the Muslim world that did the cleansing lol. At least in morocco most of the Jewish population left after Israel was founded, after the actual Holocaust in Europe. Not because of ethnic cleansing (though I agree they were treated badly, and I understand why they left).
But according to you the ethnic cleansing of the Jews was okay because it somehow wasn't a genocide right? Otherwise why would you be okay with what Israel is doing right now after saying that what israel is doing is
just like the cleansing of the Jews?
And going back to the original point, are you saying that voting against the administration that enabled the gen- I mean ethnic cleansing of your population is somehow voting against your self interests? Talk about complete partisan blindsidedness.
You don't believe that Jews were ethnically cleansed from Muslim countries? Considering Egypt for example, what else would we call the expulsion of 25,000 Jews?
Morocco in particular didn't have an explicit state policy of ethnically cleansing Jews, but "treated badly" is a bit of an understatement, considering the pogroms and the government policy of essentially holding Jews for ransom.
Actually you are right, I was wrong about that. I was thinking about before Israel's foundation (as in, Jews lived in the Muslim worlds for a long time without ethnic cleansing).
As for morocco, yes they were very much treated as worse than second class citizens.
So yeah, I agree that Jews were basically pushed to leave, and at some point were just directly kicked out and cleansed out of a lot of Muslim countries.
I just find it weird to justify Israel's actions by saying that what they are doing is "just ethnic cleansing" which is basically what the comment I was replying was doing. Not only is it super weird, but it's also telling to only apply that logic to Muslims. Can Jews just go and massacre Germans and Europeans because of the Holocaust? Then why justify the wholesale destruction of a Muslim city with that?
I didn't say "just" ethnic cleansing. I said that ethnic cleansing is different from genocide. Because it is. We should be careful to use the correct words.
In the sense mass murder is different from genocide, sure. It can be an expression of a genocidal regime but in some case it might not be.
But since you refuse to explain why you want to make this distinction and how it applies to the treatment of the palestinians it doesn't seem like care, it seems more like you want to bikeshed.
The jews in Egypt didn't have much problems with their neighbours until nazism and zionism arrived.
'The bad muslims mistreated the jews when they came under influence of german thought, typical muslims, a european would never'.
Jews lived in Morocco since the first century AD, with the exception of the Fez massacre in 1033, mainly in peace. It's where jews could find immediate refuge when the christians drove them out of al-Andalus. 1948 onwards there were anti-jewish riots in Morocco, in response to jews leaving to presumably take part in the zionist atrocities in Palestine and the state of Israel.
Today anti-jewish and anti-zionist sentiment in Morocco is typically tied into anti-monarchist views, the king is perceived to be a traitor and possibly controlled by some supposed jewish conspiracy. You'll find a rather clear expression of this in e.g. Ahmed Rami, the infamous exiled antisemite, who combines distinctly nazi antisemitism with a moroccan muslim nationalism.
I take it you wanted to start your list after islam arrived, but failed and doesn't know the muslims didn't arrive until 639 or so? And that's why you left out the roman pogroms?
It's for good reason sharia prescribes legal protections for jews, christian romans and byzantians persecuted jews incessantly.
Edit: Zionism is mainly a protestant christian movement, it's a lot about historical revisionism regarding christian antisemitism. Most of the members are christians, the funding comes mainly from christians, the weapons are provided by christian countries, it's based on a naive distinctly protestant (i.e. 'literal' and cherry picked) reading of the Bible, and so on.
But you didn't, you showed some examples of christians massacring jews and didn't explain in any of the examples how it was islamic religion rather than e.g. politics that caused the murder.
I still have the impression you just Ctrl-F:ed 'egypt' in a random list of supposed muslim on jew violence without looking into whether it was truthful or the historical context.
What do you think the significance of Khaybar is? Are you unaware that the story goes something like this, Muhammad and his group were established in Medina, and had peace treaties there except for a group of medinese jews in Khaybar, which they besieged for some time, until they signed a treaty with them where they left them in peace in exchange for a tax in the form of dates? This is roughly at the same time as the first muslims got a peace treaty with the meccans and were allowed to begin with pilgrimage.
Usually these events are retold as evidence of Muhammad's ability to quickly resolve violent conflict and enter into diplomatic relations with their neighbours without a lot of bloodshed, but you don't seem to be aware of this. The battle of Khaybar saw something like fifteen thousand from jewish tribes in Khaybar against a tenth of that in a very brief siege and some skirmishes, with only like a hundred dead and fifty injured. Quick and relatively bloodless, and other peace treaties were also negotiated as a result.
It's also very weird to recall battles in the early 600s to excuse more than a century of terrorism and other atrocities in recent times. Roughly as absurd as the serb nationalist cult of the battle of Kosovo Polje. Are you into that stuff as well?
How is not voting for the administration that enabled and did absolutely nothing to stop the genocide of their relatives or community in Gaza voting against their self interest?
You realize that the deaths that happened in Gaza are probably more important than whatever grievances you have against Trump for some people? We are talking about tens of thousands of deaths, directly enabled by the previous administration (not only politically but with direct military shipments of the bombs that killed said people). But Muslim lives are typically completely worthless for a large part of the American population so your comment doesn't really surprise me.
No, that's not what I said. But that doesn't mean that people would actively vote for the previous administration. They just won't vote at all.
And I'm not sure what you mean by doubling down. Biden was basically letting Israel do whatever it wanted to do. Absolutely did nothing for more than a year of bloodshed. Doing anything (like direct discussions with Hamas, bypassing israel) is better than just doing nothing. Even if Trump is a drooling, die hard supporter of Israel.
Like if Trump did what Biden let Israel do, I don't think the Muslim population would've been surprised. But even the reddest/war hawks of presidents(Reagan, Bush) never let Israel just have a complete carte blanche. Yet Biden, a supposed ally of the community, did.
Yes, Democrats have been historically seen as the party that cared the most about Muslim interests in the US. Just like it is the party that traditionally gets the most support from the black community for example.
Again, this complete disregard for Muslim life could've been expected from Bush or whatever. But even he wouldn't have let Israel go this far without some sort of faint condemnation or call for restraints. Biden didn't. Especially since Biden wasn't some sort of toothless president, we saw how he reacted to the Russian invasion, and how firm he was against Russia. I guess it showed how Ukrainian lives seemed to be worth much more for his administration, whereas the lives of Gaza civilians wasn't even worth a stern condemnation.
Catering to a population doesn't inherently means that you push for all of its beliefs.
Is any politician that supports Israel to gain support from Jewish voters pushing for Judaism or Jewish (religious) values? Do you think that Judaism, the actual religion, is any more progressive with say, feminism, than Islam?
Why does it matter? Wr are discussing religious groups in the US. The comment I replied to said that catering to American Muslims doesn't make sense if you are a progressive because Islam isn't. But somehow catering to Jews (which I know isn't just a religious group) is different. So I'm asking, do you actually think that Judaism is more progressive than Islam? Again, the comment I replied to explicitly said that the community somehow equals the religion and its beliefs.
And I don't know if women have it particularly worse in Turkey than in Israel. Same goes for gay people, though I'd agree that I'd rather be gay in Israel that in Turkey or any other Muslim country. Not sure why that matters in the context of comparing the religions themselves though.
> I guess it showed how Ukrainian lives seemed to be worth much more for his administration, whereas the lives of Gaza civilians wasn't even worth a stern condemnation.
Biden is a self-described Zionist, so his politics in that regard are crystal clear.
Biden was in charge the entire time if he wanted people to think his party was better on Gaza he shouldve been better on Gaza. They dealt with a massive protest wave in blue staes and they told everyone who cared about Gazans to get fucked, then they lost. Its not hard to understand.
I have no idea how many of those giants Hegel actually influenced. The list covers so many famous intellectuals that I suppose the only 20th Century writer worth reading is Dale Carnegie; he's the only guy left!
That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of liberal values - however the fact that he was in a position of power at all was because he came from a rather backwards society that didn't champion liberal values. It is a shame the Chinese Republicans didn't manage to take, but to say there was a lot going on in China at any given moment would be an understatement.
At any point in the chain of events people could move towards liberalism and market economies, then become more prosperous. We've even got case studies where that was tried - the USSR - and a lot went wrong but it still went much better than most of the other experiments out of the 1900s. China too, eventually, where we can't really say what the end result is going to be but it has been an amazing journey so far.
The issue wasn't with these thinkers, it looks a lot more like any deviation from liberalism is a terrible mistake and it is really only a competition for who can be most liberal on the important issues (which, unfortunately, are only revealed with a little hindsight).
> That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of liberal values. however the fact that he was in a position of power at all was because he came from a rather backwards society that didn't champion liberal values.
Considering that the "liberal values" were the ideology upon which China was previously attacked and destroyed by western powers, and that the KMT, under more liberal values did the Shangai Massacre against the comunists, ending their alliance, this would be improbable. Yeah, history show how progressive is the liberal ideology and their champions...
Always interesting how the Anglo world never really got into Hegel, I guess it's their lack of real philosophical spirit that explains it. They never really got passed Hume's empiricist reflexes.
They did get into Hegel for a bit, but the subsequent developments in math, language, etc. (what is now called Analytic Philosophy) kind of wiped out the interest in them.
But yeah, you could probably argue that the empiricist approach never quite went away. Even today, analytic philosophy (which is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon) is notoriously uninterested in politics and "big society" questions.
This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is
somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation is
nothing more than railing against intellect itself.
My conjecture isn't Hegel is single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation. After all I don't have a reason to think he intended that, nor do I think civilisation will necasarily fall. Most villains of the thought, ideologues and philosophers are basing their operas on Hegel's.
All I am saying Hegel established a framework which eased the works of some scum.
You might enjoy Rick Roderick's "Masters of Suspicion" where he talks
about the influence (and perceived influence) of Nietzsche, Freud,
Marx and some other individuals credited with "changing the world".
"You notice I haven’t given an analysis of the Enlightenment but of
modernity, of modernisation, of the advance of capital, because
four pedants don’t make an age. And two or three weird philosophers
don’t give birth to a century of unreason. You know, Nietzsche
didn’t, you know, from his drawing room give birth to a century of
cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the
raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the
despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or five
pedants do not have that much power, and never have. That’s just a
sort of bugbear. They didn’t 'unleash unreason on the world'
Jesus... how crazy can some people get. I mean, even in the
postmodern world you shouldn't be that crazy, to say that three or
four pedants invented this stuff. " -- R. Roderick Nietzsche’s
Progeny (1991)
This is likely a use of "pedant" in the more precise pre-vulgarization sense, probably, with a stronger suggestion of "school teacherly" or "insularly academic" than "nit-picking know-it-all". Might help readers follow it.
A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste.
If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to
identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton
every time a vase falls off a shelf?
Nevertheless, as an entity with mass Isaac Newton was complicit in contributing towards gravity’s tyrannical effects. In fact, his corpse continues to exert a gravitational pull to this day. /s
Karl Marx isn't responsible for anything that happened in the 20th century. People have individual responsibility for their actions, it doesn't matter where you got the idea from. Ascribing e.g. crimes of stalinism to Marx is actually terrible idea, it absolves the people who did these crimes of their own moral agency. Ideas do matter (as Gramsci has shown by example), but the moral responsibility is on the implementors.
But just out of curiosity, what exactly Marx said that you deem so dangerous? Can you show some quotes?
Well, we can start with this problematic statement. Taken to its literal conclusion, it's not surprising to think it could end up with mass graves. Granted, it originated from Mephistopheles, but Marx wasn't being poetic in his recitations.
I am not really interested in a bad faith debate. I take it you're quoting this passage:
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s Faust, Part One.]
Can you explain, in your interpretation, what was Marx trying to say?
Any accounting scheme which assigns Marx blame for the consequences of his poorer ideas, has to assign far more to "wise potentate" believers. Or even people who unironically use words like "wise potentate" at all.
> If ideas matter, then spectacularly bad ideas should have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your point.
Uhh, why someone like Sartre or Foucault is on this list, equal to Lenin or Mao? It's hard for me to see how they as existentialists were on par of them; and if so, ought we blame Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky too?
I am asking genuinely on your stance because I don't see why you consider them to be evil.
I don't think the list makes any sense. It's just part of movement where some try to blame all the evil of the world past and present on intellectual/philosophers, that would have perversed society and academics by their ideas. The root of evil being Hegel it seems and all figures that remotely connect to him.
I think the reason here is Sartre was part of the communist party in France, for some time.
Yeahhhh, Sartre political takes were something. As a Pole I do have distaste for him because he was influential person behind banning a French translation of memoirs from gulags as that'd "offend Soviets".
Still, at best I see him as a naive person, not evil.
You missed Gentile off the list, Neo Hegelian and “godfather of fascism”.
Hegel is useful to me as a shortcut to knowing that anything or anyone deriving from his ideas is awful. I seem to recall Bertrand Russell didn’t seem fond either, Hegel’s entry in the History of Philosophy certainly wasn’t a glowing review.
Yes, we could organize gatherings where we purify ourselves of such works of degenerate literature by gathering all the copies we can find and burning them /s
That's the wrong way - the way of the likes of 'fascists' and 'anti-fascists' alike - to go at that problem. A better way is to point out where Hegelian thought can lead and has led in the past. No books need to be burned, more books need to be published and read while educational institutions should stop pushing books which promote the destructive aspects of Hegel's thoughts. Yes, that means that Howard Zinn should not be used as the historian of choice in the USA, that all the different 'Marxist critique/perspective on ...' studies are not the ones to base the curriculum on and that terms like 'decolonising Shakespeare' [1] should become the exception rather than the rule when dealing with the cultural inheritance of 'the West'.
I understand that you were trying to sound edgy but the effort falls flat in the light of the many examples of 'book burnings' - between quotes because physical book burnings are out of vogue - by the authoritarian progressives who slowly marched through the institutions of academia. National socialists censored books by burning them, international socialists censor them by 'decolonising' the curriculum [2] and the library [3].
I appreciate the thought put into this reply, but there's been some sort of miscommunication. An /s tag, like the one at the end of my previous comment, is meant to indicate sarcasm. I'm about as edgy a person as Donny Osmond.
There is a difference between 'pushing' those books and taking their message into account in the curriculum. I did not call for a ban on such books - just before the part you quoted I said No books need to be burned, more books need to be published and read - but they should not be the leading voices.
> you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are.. [..] "consistent with scripture" so to speak.
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and similarly biased publications can be considered scripture [see also 1] in 'progressive' circles, especially those found around educational institutions. They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim but probably not in the way you intended.
They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim
I'm confused?
That seems to prove exactly what I was saying. That if you only allow kids to read the books that are "consistent with scripture" they are less educated. I'll take this opportunity to add that making any "scripture" the leading voices, leads to less educated kids.
Your ideas will lead to the "dumbing down" of a society. I mean, maybe it will be a society sufficiently dumb enough to accept the doctrinal import of your preferred scriptures? But it'd still be a pretty dumb society.
Yes, you are clearly confused if you think not using 'scripture' (as in ideologically driven course material) as base for the curriculum will lead to 'dumbing down' of society. Maybe you should read again what I wrote and rewrite or remove your confused and confusing answer? Here's what we discussed, in order:
YOU: Well, I mean, you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are.. um.. "consistent with scripture" so to speak.
[ here you state using scripture (or books consistent with it) are a poor base for a curriculum ]
ME: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and similarly biased publications can be considered scripture [see also 1] in 'progressive' circles, especially those found around educational institutions. They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim but probably not in the way you intended.
[ here I state "indeed is a poor base, just look at the disastrous results achieved by using 'scripture'" ]
YOU: I'm confused? That seems to prove exactly what I was saying. That if you only allow kids to read the books that are "consistent with scripture" they are less educated. I'll take this opportunity to add that making any "scripture" the leading voices, leads to less educated kids. Your ideas will lead to the "dumbing down" of a society. I mean, maybe it will be a society sufficiently dumb enough to accept the doctrinal import of your preferred scriptures? But it'd still be a pretty dumb society.
[ here you repeat what I said in different words and directly after that claim that 'my ideas' (i.e. not using scripture as the base for a curriculum) will lead to 'dumbing down' of society ]
Where you probably go wrong is in the assumption that not using 'scripture' as the base for a curriculum means the doctrines of that scripture will not be discussed in any way. This is clearly mistaken since a non-doctrinal curriculum by necessity needs to explain those doctrines to explain where it differs from the doctrinal versions. Howard Zinn is a Marxist who does not like western society and culture and would like to see it succumb to some revolution or other - a doctrinal position. There is probably a similarly biased Conservative nationalist author somewhere who thinks western society and specifically the North American iteration of it is the pinnacle of human development but I can no think of a name since his books are clearly not part of the curriculum where Zinn's are. Both these authors, Zinn and the non-name Conservative nationalist produced heavily biased works which are not suitable as a base for a curriculum. That does not mean they should not be discussed, it just means they should not be leading the discussion. Reading the Communist Manifesto does not make you a Communist after all, reading Mein Kampf does not make you a National Socialist, reading the Quotations of Chairman Mao does not make you a Maoist. I say read them all and discuss their influence, show where they went wrong but also acknowledge that these works are the products of time and circumstance which created the conditions for their impact - the exploitation of industrial workers in the beginning of the industrial revolution, the single-sided blame for the first world war being put on the German Empire and the burden of the Versailles treaty weighing down the German populace, the succession of unpopular imperial dynasties and the power vacuum left after the 1911 revolution in China which the KMT/GMD failed to fill which create the stage for the next revolution.
Is there a name for the approach I favour? I think there is: the liberal arts curriculum [1]. Of course I'm referring to the original ideas behind this curriculum, not the 'modern' bastardised ideologically driven implementation of it. If it is called 'liberal' in the USA it is most likely not related to the original ideas behind either liberalism or the liberal arts curriculum - it is more likely to be the antithesis of it by being doctrinally rigid and closed to viewpoints outside the desired narrative.
History stopped being useful and became a meaningless recreation when it moved away from the fact that facts are absolute, not relative to the observer.
What strikes me is how much of these current geopolitical events are driven by singular individuals whose current inclinations were shaped by their very arbitrary past encounters.
For example, if you take the current US administration's hostility towards Europe. That might just be the result of the Vice President being at Yale and encountering a few snobby children of European old money, and they might have been a bit too mean to him, and that might be the sole reason he has so much antipathy towards the whole of Europe.
The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
Things get better, sometimes they get worse. Generally people are better off materially than they have ever been, but people do not change all that much morally.
> and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to the rubbish we are in right now.
So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal" phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example with the collapse of the roman empire.
"People do not change that much morally."
Greed is part of what humans are. It's part of what destroys societies. Building a society that can survive human nature long term is an unsolved problem.
You sound like you expected that, after the end of the Cold War, we had a perfect society, and then we fell from a state of grace and ruined it. No, after the end of the Cold War, the pressure was removed that had been keeping us from acting on our worst impulses. Turns out that many of us were worse than we expected.
I would add pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. (CatGPT did a pretty good job: https://dpaste.com/HTS9DWRNZ-preview)
Wait tell me more about CatGPT
I prefer Clawed
The French claim that it farts.
"Cat I farted" in French, fwiw
Woe, Frolic, Dread, Malice - world needs to be severed.
Yeah, we need a better take on society and education --- see the discussion of Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Child and the Shadow":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525079
> People do not change all that much morally
This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:
"The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape American culture"
There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.
> There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.
Culture war at this point is more than a decade old. It did not start with Project 2025. It started on the Internet.
Also, GP said people do not change all that much morally. That much is true. Organizations change fast. Societies change slower. The acted on rules are a combination of three, but it's important to be aware of the distinctions and the dynamics.
I'm not sure that makes sense to me; how do society's moral rules change (slowly) but peoples' moral rules don't/change little? I mean I can think of some isolated examples like pirating video content, but generally a society's moral rules reflect its constituents; where else do those rules come from, if not its people?
Culture. Humans have pretty stable moral intuitions about the basics - fairness, reciprocity, value of life; AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems.
In short: "theft is bad" is something people are born with[1]; "pirating media is bad" isn't; the former will be universal wherever you go, the latter depends strongly on who you ask[2]; the former is constant throughout history, the latter can change within months or years.
On a more general point, human society is the poster child of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" - there's a lot of ideas and institutions in our lives that are purely abstract, and exist only in the shared, social sphere. Things like money, rule of law, countries or corporations - they exist as long as people expect them to exist, but ultimately they can disappear overnight - unlike the more fundamental concepts like self-preservation or reciprocity, which are anchored in our selves.
--
[0] - If it weren't, we would have much more trouble understanding or relating to the past; the saying is that the past is a foreign country, not that it's an alien species!
[1] - Or at least it's as close to innate as we can get.
[2] - And, of course, the progress of science and technologies that made this question meaningful in the first place.
My experience is there's also a fundamentally inborn notion of "fair price" and "fair pay" that people are born with, that they have to be educated out of to operate successfully in the modern economy. It's one way in which our system is kinda anti-human—it assumes a kind of game-playing that's seen as wrong by people, naturally, and you have to play that game or you can't succeed. "What the market will bear" doesn't feel fair to people until they're made to see it as fair.
Price is just a symptom or manifestation. People naturally see it as unfair to take advantage of someone based on a power imbalance or information asymmetry. So charging an excessive price or paying a starvation wage is just one way to take advantage, but there are other non-monetary ways as well. Attempts to impose "fair" price or wage controls by legislative fiat or cultural norms are doomed to fail because they don't resolve the underlying cause.
"AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems."
Not even close! Universalized morality (e.g., "stealing is wrong") is a product of the last couple thousand years, and it's only present in some modern humans. It is the foundation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.
If you're curious about what other kinds of human experience can be like, I recommend checking out some ethnographies. Here's a summary of one: https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/1...
I think you missed “in group” vs “out group” in this comment?
I would think that the distinction lies in the time it takes to reach consensus. An individual person's moral values may change rapidly without the need for external validation. A book club may take a few weeks of debate over a heavily philosophical book to modify the perceived moral values of the group as a whole. But stretching large moral shifts across an entire populace would probably take more time and a more concerted effort to accomplish. New ideas or values need time to be sorted, whether they be picked up into the mainstream view or dropped into unfavourability.
Frankly, the culture war started in earnest in the late 60s.
So you weren't around for the 20s? The last 20s?
As old as I am, I wasn't here for the 60s either, though both would have been a total blast
Eh I remember the culture wars from the 90s [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#:~:text=1991%E2%80...
Your quoted sentence is an example of a group of people who have no idea of how to run a country. They are using the uneducated voter to support an agenda that is mostly unconstitutional. We Americans, just like other countries with a rule of law, determine our own culture within those laws.
To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping, is against the New Testament principle of "live and let live". (another way to state this principle is: "Christian, mind your own business and stay in your lane.")
This doesn't really make sense. The Democrats mainly, but also Republicans, have been reshaping our culture using federal funding for many many years now, using rules associated with federal funding, decisions for where federal funding goes to (one clear example being museum and arts funding), policies handed down from Department of Education and other federal organizations and departments, etc etc.
I guess more people notice it now that Republicans are doing this so openly but the use of federal power to reshape our culture is a well established process.
Also what does live and let live get them, especially with the other side pushing so hard? A slippery slope to an immoral society.
Just to add a bit more credence to this post, I'd point to Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed" which is 30 years old and discusses the intrusion of the federal government in shaping culture from the perspective of the right over many decades.
I've noticed that left leaning individuals tend to view their philosophies as neutral and when the federal government exerts its power in continuance of these philosophies it is viewed as a neutral application of the constitution. The right currently sees what they are doing in exactly the same way, a neutral application of the constitution.
I actually think we have two conflicting constitutions at this point. The rigid written one we are all familiar with, and a more flexible unwritten one that is based on precedent, regulation, and legislation. The right tends to prefer the former, the left the latter. As an example I think Roe v. Wade, ended up being a part of this unwritten constitution which conflicted with the written constitution. You then saw this culminate in the Dobbs decision where the left thinks a right has been taken away and the right thinks it was never a right according to the constitution.
What you call an "unwritten constitution" is the fundamental idea behind common law, which is basically the default in majority-English-speaking countries. Outside the Anglosphere[0] the standard is "civil law", which means that the law is only the stuff that was actually written down and decided upon by the parliamentary body. Everything else is optional; you aren't forced to "obey precedent", but may "follow jurisprudence" if such rulings provide relevant argumentation to the facts of the case.
This isn't a left/right thing, it's a British/French thing. And being a former British colony, America is very strictly a common law country. That's why we even have to care about the Supreme Court at all. The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to. In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
So naturally, the Constitution always has an unwritten component; to get rid of that would be effectively making a new Constitution. What people are squabbling over is what should and shouldn't be in the unwritten component, not whether or not it exists. Originalism and textualism deny the unwritten component, but nobody is actually an Originalist or textualist. There's no historical justification for the people who wrote the Constitution to want a civil law interpretation of it. Remember, they were all British lawyers and politicians. What Originalists and textualists are actually doing is using their ideology as an excuse to overturn precedent they don't like. If they were really Originalists, they'd be shutting SCOTUS down.
[0] Sharia Law and Mao-style "We won't tell you what the law is" bullshit notwithstanding
My abortion example may have muddied my point more than it helped, sorry about that. Let me try to articulate it more clearly. I'm (mostly) not discussing common law as I am focusing on the federal level. Common law tends to be more of a state concept (except Louisiana). As the Supreme Court held in Erie:
"Except in matters governed by the Federal Constitution or by Acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case is the law of the State. And whether the law of the State shall be declared by its Legislature in a statute or by its highest court in a decision is not a matter of federal concern. There is no federal general common law. Congress has no power to declare substantive rules of common law applicable in a State, whether they be local in their nature or "general," be they commercial law or a part of the law of torts. And no clause in the Constitution purports to confer such a power upon the federal courts."
There are matters of common law at the federal level, but they're not central to my broader point. When I say "unwritten constitution" I am referring to a set of laws, statutes, customs, and judicial decisions which together form an unwritten constitution that are non-binding to future legislative efforts. The Magna Carta and the 1689 English Bill of Rights still make up a part of the unwritten constitution of the UK, although the former is mostly symbolic at this point. However, no parliament can bind a future parliament in the UK. So if they wanted to repeal the 1689 Bill of Rights they could do so legislatively right now. The major advancement of the founding generation was the idea of a written constitution, one that could bind future legislators - and technically the other branches - so that the constitution itself had to be changed through a separate process. In other words Congress cannot repeal our Bill of Rights right now, it would have to go through the arduous amendment process. So when I speak of an unwritten constitution I am referring specifically to the non-binding nature of the laws and statutes that make up a set of foundational rules for a society. The phrases "unwritten constitution" and "written constitution" are fairly old and unfortunately are a bit of a misnomer in what they actually mean.
> The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to.
That's actually a good place to start for an example. Chief Justice Roberts stated recently that "[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." This highlights my point fairly well. The written constitution, the one that cannot be changed through normal legislative means, makes no such determination as to what is or is not appropriate and merely grants Congress the power of impeachment without even defining what high crimes or misdemeanors means. What I would argue has become a part of our unwritten constitution is as Roberts describes, a set of appellate courts with specific jurisdiction where the appropriate course of action for an unfavorable opinion is to appeal. However, Congress can add or remove inferior courts and determine their procedural rules and jurisdiction pretty much at will. In other words this set of courts, laws and customs developed by the legislator does not bar a future legislator from changing it to something wholly different if they so desire.
Another example would be independent agencies under the executive which has become a hot button topic lately. Article 2 Section 1 states that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." However, for a long time now we have had independent agencies which were created legislatively with a certain degree of insulation from Presidential control. I would argue that this is another example of a part of an unwritten constitution that does not bind any future legislator. It's also an area of extreme friction between the written one and the set of laws, customs, and precedent that we have developed over many decades.
Hopefully those two examples are more informative as neither are really central to common law.
> In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
That deserves a reply far longer than I can provide here. In general while I see the utility of judicial review I would argue it doesn't make sense when it comes to disputes between the federal government and a state, i.e. the federal government via the judiciary gets to have the final word over what is constitutional when a state challenges the federal government over the constitutionality of some federal action. I would also argue that Marbury v. Madison was one of the first bricks of an unwritten constitution being constructed as for the most part everyone just passively accepted it, but it is not explicitly called out in Article 3. However, there are good arguments against this.
You cannot legislate mortality. Yes, federal power/funding is the norm, but not within the confines of religious control, which is what the Project 2025 is all about.
The so called slippery slope is a worn out trope from the 80's, that has lost all meaning under the current administration. This is why live and let live works, as long as we all obey the law. We have to realize the rule of law is for everyone to adhere to, it doesn't matter how hard either side pushes, the only other option is jail.
I think the slippery slope argument from the perspective of the right has all but been proven beyond a doubt.
Yes, but their context is somewhat backward from the meaning in the 80's. Then it meant the danger of giving a little on any issue, fearful it would decay into chaos. Now the chaos is in "who gives a damn what anybody thinks" mode. (ala, Elon, the press secretary, JFK,jr and the rest of the cabinet.)
As always, much of the conflict comes down to what constitutes "your lane".
The government we have is far from a libertarian "live and let live", regulating nearly every aspect of life and taxing one person to give to another.
It decides what children are taught, who can work jobs, what is a crime, and who pays for different services.
Absolutely true, the Constitution has to be the norm for society. Religious people, such as myself, must find a way to live within it. (easy for me, not so much for others.) The current administration, supposedly run by Christians, are far afield of their "lane", but don't seem to care. Your last sentence is the one that worries me the most, because of what the Project 2025 could morph into, meaning outside the parameters of the Constitution.
Honestly, the way I see it: The people behind the 2025 stuff etc have been on the "losing" side of the culture war since 1969.
And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just laying their cards on the table.
I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative ethos -- so I feel like I have seen this narrative play out over a few decades ...
After the legalization of gay marriage they just collectively lost their shit. They see the stakes as being incredibly high. They see abortion as straight up murder. Winning the 2016 Trump presidency and taking over the US supreme court gave them a taste of blood, and a sense that they can finally reverse what they see as a profound descent into degeneracy. The trans rights stuff over the last few years has them totally incensed, as its a full-on assault (to them) on the ontological reality of family, body, identity, etc. that they consider intrinsic and holy and fundamental.
I think they're full of shit, but that's I think how this world view shakes down. It's a war because they feel the stakes are incredibly high.
People on the right or in boardrooms of various companies that are aligning themselves with these people for what they see are strategic ends are playing with fire.
As someone who grew up in an evangelical environment, this is exactly my read as well. The problem is they might still be able to "win" via a sufficient application of violence, aka state power, despite being wrong and in the minority.
I mean are we talking about the USA here or Iran?
The evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn't believe in their god will be tortured by their god for eternity. There's nothing worse than eternal torture, so they see it as their moral obligation to do anything at all to prevent others from being tortured for eternity by their god. Nothing they do to others can possibly be worse than that, so as long as they're focused on saving others any actions they take are justified (to them).
Their god considers gay sex a crime worthy of eternal torture. So anything they do to prevent people from having homosexual encounters is morally acceptable, up to and including torture & occasional execution via "conversion therapy".
Anyone who truly believes in hell is either morally bankrupt & willing to allow others to suffer for eternity, or a dangerous monster who will stop at nothing to prevent others from what they see as sinning.
Many of them don't go to the extremes they would if they actually believed they were saving others from hell. They're full of shit. But some of them do, and they're fucking terrifying.
Which means either they don't really believe in the exercise of free will, or they don't believe God is in control of who gets saved (predestination). Either way, they're not acting according to their interpretation of scripture. Being saved for a Christian shouldn't be up to governments. It wasn't for the early Christians. It was an individual choice. They're acting more like Constantine.
The pushback against trans rights advocacy is quite interesting because unlike with same-sex marriage, there are several distinct groups opposing it for fundamentally different reasons. Religious conservatives are one group. Radical feminists, female athletes, medical whistleblowers are others. And almost everyone draws a firm line against accepting gender identity beliefs in their romantic and sexual lives.
Trying to redefine "woman" and "man", "female" and "male", "homosexual" and "heterosexual" - and then reengineering society by decree based on these controversial redefinitions - is going to get opposition across the board.
I think this is why it's become such a hot "culture war" topic, because it undermines the deeply-held views of many, many more people than just religious conservatives.
Take gay marriage for instance - this was fought both for and against on the basis of it being a same-sex union. But from the perspective of gender identity believers, if, for example, someone female merely identifies as male, then marries a male (who also identifies as male), then this is a "gay marriage" too. Despite this actually being a heterosexual pairing.
On top of this, where these beliefs have been forced into law and policy, it has caused actual physical harms. Women being raped and impregnated by male prisoners who identified their way into the female prison estate is amongst the worst of these. But lawmakers in states that have enabled this will claim it's progressive policy, somehow. Even though it's regressing back to over a century ago when mixed-sex prisons where commonplace and incarcerated women were at constant risk of sexual violence and exploitation from the men they were locked up with.
I dunno man, "citation needed" about a lot of your screed.
On the whole the freaking out about "trans" stuff is mostly a red herring or strawman used for strategic propagandistic purposes more than it is reflecting any real world problematic.
Making outlandish claims about how liberals are trying to do X, Y, and Z to their children's education or sports forces liberals onto the defensive forcing them to defend hormone therapy for 12 year olds or whatever when the actual number of real world incidents of this is vanishingly small.
I don't personally carry any kind of radical gender identity theory, but I care about the rights of minorities and it's none of my business what other people do and I see no problem with the public and corporate sphere accomodate pronoun usages or even bathroom accomodations, it's unlikely to cause harms and it doesn't hurt me in the slightest.
It's also somewhat ... interesting ... to bring up defense of female prisoner's rights and their conditions as some kind of demarcation point.
Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane prisons now?
Because that would be great. But unlikely.
> Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane prisons now?
> Because that would be great. But unlikely.
I don't know where I'm at on this, but this is ad hominem. You can't discredit an argument based on who's making it. If you're opposed to humane prisons, just say so. But that's not what I'm getting.
Why would you blanket care about the rights of minorities? I care about the rights of lots of beings, but not minorities for minorities sake.
The person isn't making outlandish claims. You can search the web and validate all of them.
Liberals, as in new leftists responsible for the majority of purity spiral shaming we've seen on the internet for oh the last two decades now, are in fact responsible for their fair share of extremist ideologies that some folks have now taken as self-evident. This is despite the fact that many of us who once considered ourselves part of their ranks are completely sick of its absolutist language.
I've been pushed into what I guess must be a kind of center because it seems we can no longer have any discourse of any nuance around issues like trans people without being labeled a fascist or maniac neo-Nazi right-winger.
To take an example of this, I have a very close friend who is trans but even she is sick of how faddish transness has become. She insists she's a trans-medicalist, something I only recently learned about, which seems to set the bar appropriately high to being what global society (not the ultra-left view that dominates places like HN and Reddit) deems a woman.
I actually do believe in biological gender and even think the fact biological women are out there bleeding and suffering once a month in ways men can't even begin to understand does in fact separate them from other people stating they are now a woman. Or literally growing a human being inside them is both a privilege and a horror that marks someone so indelibly we call this person a woman.
Yet I can no longer reasonably even engage most of you in a nuanced discourse about this without likely getting downvoted to oblivion. There was a time once when you could, but now it seems that time has passed.
Try repeating the paragraph before the last to your "friend". Even transmedicalists tend to not be fond of this line of thinking.
> but now it seems that time has passed.
I am glad. I have yet to see any form of actually nuanced discussion about this that involves a cis person so far.
Anyway, none of this is "center".
And you have illustrated my point perfectly, even down to using air quotes to describe a relationship of my own. Did you intend to go further and perhaps call me something truly awful? As I am not "center" according to you.
I am able to maintain friendships with people I disagree with, even on very fundamental things.
You capture exactly the drift that has occurred in discourse, where neither side is able to talk to each other with any level-headedness, but remains fixed in escalation, certain the other side intends their extinction.
I think trans advocacy is interesting and different from gay rights because it goes beyond "live and let live" and is also an ontological battle. That is to say, it is a battle not just for equal rights, but over what people think, believe, and desire.
It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the libertarian arguments of gay rights.
The movement is is inherently cultural and poorly suited for adjudication the legal/political sphere. Courts and laws can't make people love, accept, or believe someone is a given gender.
Maybe you're too young to remember when "gay rights" was also an "ontological battle" ? -- a huge a fight over whether such an "identity" was anything other than a fundamental deviance, and a lot of rhetoric to the effect that it violates "natural order." It wasn't just theological thing from Christians, it came from the mainstream of society.
Some people still speak this way in North America but it is fringe. It wasn't fringe when I was a kid. It was the expected way of thinking about sexuality.
In the early 80s at least there was only two "mainstream" ways to talk about homosexuality, as far as I can recall:
1. what happens in people's bedrooms is none of my business, just don't talk about it in public and expect tolerance, or
2. this is total deviance and a mental illness and needs to be cured. (Oh, and they deserve HIV for such unnatural behaviour.)
That changed, but only in the 90s/2000s, to an understanding that homosexuality itself is "natural" ("born this way"), and the so-called iron-clad laws of natural behaviour were "allowed" to include homosexuality. And even gay marriage.
Appeals to laws of nature and assumptions about what is natural mask ideology, and often look completely ridiculous 50 years later.
I remember the nature vs nurture debate, and always disagreed with it. I think it pigeon holed and disempowered the gay and the queer community for decades. I think it overstated the science, and understated the value of human autonomy.
That said, the battleground was about what they could do, so a live and let live compromise was possible. Gradual acceptance followed and continues increasing today.
With Trans, there battleground is belief, and even more critically, identity. Accepting homosexuals didnt require people to redefine themselves, their own gender, and that of the one they are attracted to. Self identity is incredibly important to people.
Conservatives present it that way, but I haven't seen that in practice. The majority of trans people are perfectly happy with people believing whatever they want as long as they treat other people with respect and don't discriminate against them.
I guess it really depends on the space. The trans debate is happening online in an extreme way that simply wasn't possible during gay rights movement of the 90s and early 2000's.
I agree that most of my trans coworkers and acquaintances seem satisfied with being treated the respect I give anyone, and keep any unflattering thoughts to myself. Meanwhile, there is a contingent of zealots on reddit that call me a bigot if I dont want to date a trans-woman or think biology should be considered in sports. Is that discrimination?
What is discrimination? Is it any delineation in treatment or perception from a cis-gendered person?
I have given a lot of thought to the topic because I support others having personal autonomy, but place value on my conceptions of gender.
> It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the libertarian arguments of gay rights.
No one is forcing you to date someone you're not attracted to.
I find that to be an extremely common argument against trans ppl. It's very similar to the whole gay panic thing. I was surprised when I realized how worried some cis men were about being "tricked" into sleeping with a trans person. As if there are so many trans people and as if all of them want to get into their pants.
> It's very similar to the whole gay panic thing. I was surprised when I realized how worried some cis men were about being "tricked" into sleeping with a trans person.
Most of the time I see the argument that people feel pressured/forced to date someone they're not attracted to it's not about men being "tricked"
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028041752/https://www.bbc.c...
Ditto.
[flagged]
I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he viewed the whole situation.
He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered:
It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.
It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about.
PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.
I have no comment on what your professor said, but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist. Optimistic outlooks are too often met with a kind of reflexive dismissal or despair in a "I feel like things are really bad right now, have never been this bad before, and thus can never improve" diatribe.
There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed, but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more realistic than optimism.
Cynicism sells in the 21st century.
> cynicism,
The cynicism comes from the fact that many people (including me) have decided to check out from what is going on in the world and instead focus on what we can control in our daily lives.
It also comes from the fact that in many countries the social contract is broken.
You are still expected to pay your taxes but the services provided are increasingly of bad quality such as schools,hospitals, judicial system and so on.
So much so in fact that it seems to me that this relationship that the people have with the state is becoming more and more one sided. Like in an abusive relationship of some sort.
Look at the number of people who don't bother to vote anymore because at the end of the day it does not make much difference to their lives.
There is profound sense of injustice in the world at the moment but it is being swept under the carpet.
Part of the problem is the whole "In the long run, we're all dead" thing. If things are going to be bad for the next 30 years, that's most of the rest of my useful life. If my life leading up to this point was miserable and the rest of my life is going to be as bad or worse, then I'm not sure I care how things will be in 200 years.
> but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist.
Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away. The instincts still need something to work with even after all the real threats are gone.
Meh.
It's not really cynicism.
It's just that people today only care about the next 20 or 30 years. They don't really care if, over the course of the next 200 years, two nations can rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.
I'm at the age where 30 years may well be the rest of my life (even assuming a fairly normal old-age sort of death) and 50 almost certainly is, so while I do care about what happens after for my kids, they'll also be quite old by then, so "the whole rest of your life during which you're still significantly active, plus all of your kids' lives up to as late as late-middle-age, by which time they're firmly set on their life courses and family planning and such, will suck" is... pretty bad.
> rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.
Maybe this was your intention or maybe not, but this is kinda what I'm talking about. It presupposes that there will be nuclear exchanges and annihilation in the first place, because, well, why wouldn't there be? Life is shit, tensions are high, and that's the grim dark end we all see coming anyway?
Peace and prosperity in 200yr won't help my retirement in 30.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Planting trees is categorically fraud, waste, and abuse under the current regime.
I love a low effort circle jerk as much as the next online commentor but let's be real here, nobody who's worried about stuff lower down the pyramid of needs can afford the luxury of donating resources to a hypothetical future.
Society hasn't earned me caring about it. If it wanted me to care then it shouldn't have spent decades kicking me around.
"Fine"? Did the history professor consider anything other than history or politics? The way global warming and our general destruction of nature is going (not just species or climate but also e.g. depletion of groundwater in a lot of heavily populated areas), I'm not sure democracy will be our biggest concern in 200 years' time.
No, he did not consider things that have never happened before.
He can only extrapolate from events that already happened. Human made global warming is a first time, so difficult to say what will happen from a historical perspective.
> Human made global warming is a first time
Human-made global warming appears to go back to the advent of agriculture, though, so for all intents and purposes it has been a constant throughout the history of which we speak.
Ted was so right.
Given predicted decline i global population size, some of these effect will be partially offset by less pressure from the population.
Oh, coincidentally, that is just the time window of the technological singularity.. where we either ascend to a peace- & powerful interplanetary civilization - or accidentally eradicate ourselves out of a collective lack of wisdom and sense of connectedness. Let's play..
I think the "technological singularity" is just the rapture for people who listen to sam harris
Not to take anything away from this witty comment, but I think Harris is more on the doomer side?
Maybe that's what you meant after all.
You're quite right; I think the "rationalists" tend to be a little more cynical (or realistic, as most would probably put it).
Millenarianism is evergreen.
> It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.
What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation.
Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really wouldn't be that optimistic.
What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.
To be fair, he was making wild guesses. He is professor of history, not a professor of omens. He can't read future, no more then anyone else.
Yeah exactly. People read way too much into this
There is a problem with this though. It is the price paid in exchange for democracy. Take Syria for example. It took huge human loss to free itself from Assad, Iran and Russian influence. Is the price justified? Of course in the long run autocracies fail. The lifespan of the ruler is one duration we can associate (Putin is on the verge of death). But the damage can often be very significant and take generation to undo. Just to be clear, I was very much in favor of removing those murderers. I just wonder if there were ways to mitigate this (here, EU and US should have stepped in, which they failed to do. However, they are doing it in Ukraine, which is great)
> Take Syria for example. It took huge human loss to free itself from Assad, Iran and Russian influence.
And then it fell in the hands of radical islamists. Is this the outcome that everyone was hoping for?
I disagree with that assessment. It is currently led by someone widely popular in Syria. Ultimately, the people are free to elect whoever they choose. The point is it is unequivocal most of them rejected Iranian and Russian influence and a barbarous Assad regime. Of course rebuilding will take time, and there might be some extreme factions (religious or leftovers from the Assad regime). But freedom prevailed. Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
> I disagree with that assessment.
This is not an assessment. It's the truth. Jolani is a former al-Qaeda member whose organization is still considered a terrorist organization. The US even had a prize on his head.
> Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
You response to an opinion that is different than yours is to insult someone who is willing to engage with you. If you are not interested in debating, no point in commenting.
“democracy will continue to increase its footprint”
What was this based on?
Extrapolation from what he knows about history.
Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example.
We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.
But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.
I do not think we have enough historical evidence for such an extrapolation. Human societies have been getting more and more complex, necessitating more and more complex governance. We are at a point of crisis, where the electorate is supposed to decide through voting, and our elected politicians are supposed to decide through legislation, on topics that neither the electorate, nor the elected are able to fully understand. It is not clear to me that democracy will triumph.
Sure we do. Go read H.G. Wells "The World Set Free". It's pre WWII, covers these exact topics, and could have been written yesterday. When it was written none of the problems were new.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
The things that people really want will always be scarce. Even lower energy prices or better political leaders can't change that reality.
That's a non sequitur. Just because human societies have been getting more and more complex doesn't necessarily mean we need more and more complex governance. We might be better off with radically less governance, and just accept the consequences that sometimes bad things will happen due to lack of governance.
I just don't agree with any of this.
This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?
This is the easiest time ever to be alive.
I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.
The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.
This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.
> the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church
I think it is more accurate to say it broke the power of the aristocracy by causing a labour shortage.
The black death happened in the 14th century, the reformation in the 16th
The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
> It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
Definitely a great place to start!
Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic? I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.
BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP replacement protocols years back that were being developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
Political scientists just call what we have democracy, same as everyone else. It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
> It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
The world gets both better and worse.
It doesn't have to get worse. Conversely, it doesn't have to get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone in some random point in history because there are too many outliers on both ends of that one.
Well, WWIII or some other form of nuclear strikes may change that perception.
I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy, inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target, each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.
What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I strongly prefer not to.
> cannot cope with things going back to normal.
Interesting take on "normal" by Canadian physician Gabor Maté.
https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/
>and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
how do we define "normal" for society?
Very loosely?
There really is no normal - things change over time. It would be more accurate to say it was the end of an period of unusual stability and security.
Normal is what we're willing to accept in exchange for our comfort.
I think that sort of analysis ignores the things that we gave up to get our golden age; such that a return to normal would actually mean ending up worse than we were before in many ways. We accepted Capitalism's race to the bottom in exchange for the benefits of consumerism. Now we are being asked to give up consumerism but there's no indication that we will also go back to a time before everything was cheaply made plastic crap.
> frightened into rationality
An oxymoron if I ever heard one. To become rational means letting go of fears (to a large extent). I fear that one reason we fail to act is that we are guided by fear. Fear makes us focus on the wrong things. And I fear that in a civilized society fear becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Fear makes us obsess about the problem and how to avoid it in the very narrow and short term. It doesn't make us very good at long term planning and execution. It's an instinct that is evolved for animals that want to avoid predators, not for civilization builders.
Building a civilization requires vision, big plans and the feeling that we can afford bold ideas. We need to take risks. But how can we take more risks when we're constantly afraid of the future? How can we build a better future when all we do all day is imagining the worst possible future? If our minds are constantly occupied by dystopia we can't plan for anything else. So that's what we build.
I'd argue we evolved to think rationally in order to specifically advance our instinctive drives, rather than the "Triume brain" view of the neocortex and lizard brain fighting for dominance. Immediate and extreme danger enforces a realistic and calculating view of reality, when otherwise people tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with a danger.
Courage is the ability to choose an alternative besides first choice of fear. But it isn't necessarily rational either, more likely a different instinctive motivation winning out. A completely emotionless person, meanwhile, would probably be completely nonfunctional.
I'm in the same camp, and I go step further and avoid places where fear is the main tune.
As I see it, Optimism is usually unrational but drives change and Fear kills optimism.
Trust is not purely rational its emotional. Fear kills trust, making you more rational in the sense that you assume other players are rationally adversarial.
As I see it, pessimism is as "unrational" as optimism. There's a big span of uncertainty about the future that is filled by our intentions and beliefs. If we commit to a pessimistic worldview we are likely to make some decisions that lead towards such a world. If we commit to an optimistic worldview we are likely to get exploited by bad actors.
We have to be able to juggle both realities. That is rational.
(But I think we are essentially saying the same thing here.)
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Excellent book on the theme using Zambia in the 70s as a case study:
Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to a prolonged period of sharp economic decline. [1]
"From now on, it's just down, down, down..." sighed one informant (p. 13). As Ferguson argues, "Zambia's recent crisis is not only an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way people are able to understand their experi- ence and imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatical- ly eroded" (p.15). [2]
Not that long afterwards there was a revolution.
[1] https://www.ucpress.edu/books/expectations-of-modernity/pape...
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002190960303800...
The key argument I read here is that, due to specialisation, academic philosophy is currently unfit to apprehend today's problems. It is no longer capable of incorporating politics, and politics itself has escaped rational discourse. Historians are enjoying some new limelight, and popular value-revisionism is in the air, at least if Lucy Worsley's BBC series is anything to go by.
The question is: "What is progress, really?"
Nice article, but framing it around the doomsday clock felt like the author just needed to express his angst on whatever page was in front of him
"Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation."
-- Schopenhauer
"Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philosophize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of the divine substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams."
-- Hegel
Schopenhauer! He's one of the guys in the quotes of the big time jerks article!
https://medium.com/luminasticity/quotes-of-the-big-time-jerk...
“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer
Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or https://dailynous.com).
The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically ridiculed for even attempting to do so.
And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris, talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too niche and far into his own entertainment career.)
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social milieu.
The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical populist individuals and small unaffiliated groups of thinkers able to operate without material resources. The Goldilocks zone of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical, "high-risk" enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the 21st century.
Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.
Common to all "3rd options" seems to be their (read, immediate) implicit/tacit "dual-use" assumption:
Egs:
DARPA: every new findout is an edge for beating the soviets
Patronage: sooner or later, but most likely sooner, you come up with something your funder can brag about or profit from or simply feel good about
(Detour back to second options.
Academia: professors must bring in the tuition bacon at the very least
Industry: academics can immediately reverse engineer your artifacts or even patents, if they happen not to be mere positioning.)
Bell labs: if you squint hard enough, everything is related to infocomm infra
Sorry, had to try to beat that "one day everything will see the sun!" clause
https://archive.today/latest/www.nytimes.com/1985/01/06/nyre...
The traditional 3rd option was the patronage by a rich benefactor. The modern version is patreon. It's imperfect but seems to work pretty well for some.
Patreon is still dependent on the creator caring about what their audience wants, what the market wants, etc. This is a distinctly "populist" approach, which does have its downsides: specifically if there is important work that doesn't have a wide audience, or takes years to get any results.
Your third option sounds suspiciously similar to golden-age DARPA, which had been created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957?
The kicker is it's not really a dichotomy either. Academia and industry have gotten closer together, colluding to decide what research is funded and what is silently dropped, what is taught and what never makes it onto the curriculum. This is even framed as a good thing by governments who talk of academic-industry "alignment" and how the academy "serves" industry. It's a way to get public money for training that is a subsidy to commercial interests.
"Objective" higher education and research designed to shape industry by genuine innovation is as rare as rocking-horse shit - mainly in niche areas of physics or biotech that don't have any commercial application yet.. but might one day.
I won't call it a grand theory but I like this solution to the puzzle.
https://gaby.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/wilde-democracy/
I would like the idea of voting diplomas, but ensuring that such gate-keeping can evolve over time without being gamed to slowly strip a larger & larger fraction of the population of representation over time is a really tricky problem.
Thus, I think that the freedom to vote & to hold office should be enshrined in the constitution for everyone, regardless of criminal history or citizenship.
It would take a similarly isolated gov department to rate and set the difficulty. That one should probably not have a diploma.
That the system will be gamed is no real concern as that battle will continue forever. This version is at least capable of plugging the hole when enough people notice it.
The freedom to hold the generic office seems fine. For a specialized department some relevant experience and diplomas isn't a lot to ask. If unskilled employees could do a great job in any occupation we would see this in the private sector. I think it can just be left for judgement by the voter.
> The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories
I mean, considering Hegel's grand theory indirectly lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the 20th century, maybe that's not a bad thing?
> China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.
An annoyance of mine is that this person is from Europe and seems to ignore that the UK[0] and France[1] are modernizing and, at least in the UK's case, expanding their stockpiles.
There seems to be a continental myopia towards the European role in adding to the problems of the world.
EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, it doesn't make me wrong.
[0]https://fas.org/publication/delays-deferment-and-continuous-...
[1]https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-07/nuclear-notebook-fre...
Idealism sucks ass.
Ideally, it sucks the most ass of all.
It’s a story of the unfolding of human progress told by an idiot, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing if you pay attention to what the idiot thinks is important.
All a bunch of narcissists who's whole MO is showing off how smart they can be with words, with net negative to society.
Literally if all the morally righteous smartarses from Marx to Hegel to whichever modern university-produced cretins had done the world a favour and died nice and young the world would be a far better place.
[flagged]
How did it contribute to bringing trump to power?
It altered voting intent by both Jewish and Islamic groups in ways which were net negative for Harris. The margin of error in voting was less than the number of votes swayed.
All of this is out weighed by the "didn't vote" but democrat didn't vote was larger than before. If this issue stimulated a vote boycott it could have affected democrat voters more.
That argument is not really credible to me, saying that democrats did not vote or voted republican because Harris (and Biden before her) were too favorable towards Israel, ignores the fact that it was glaringly obvious that trump would be even more favorable towards Israel.
I have certainly heard people say that they couldn't support Harris because the Biden administration was too close to Israel, so instead didn't vote at all. I know it doesn't make sense to hand the election to somebody objectively worse on an issue they claim to care about, but there it is.
I suspect that whole thing was driven by some clever folks trying to get Trump into power.
I have multiple people in my life that followed this mindset as well, to offer some more anecdata.
I never got a rationale when asked, which still perplexes me considering these people weren’t fans of the republicans in this past race.
No need to rely on anecdotal evidence:
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/03/nx-s1-5249686/arab-muslim-vot...
Trump was an isolationist in his first term, and his campaign used this to convince muslim voters that he'd continue this in his second term and withdraw support for Israel.
Instead, he announced a US funded ethnic cleansing campaign in the region, and the cornerstone of his budget is funding to illegally deploy the US Military in the US. One of their main goals is rounding up "anti-semetics" which seems to mean anyone that's against genocide, especially this exact group of Trump voters.
My suspicion is that they fell for it because they're less familiar with US politics, either due to a language barrier or due to being 1st and 2nd generation immigrants without grandparents that remember the McCarthy trials, or the US deporting jews back to Nazi Germany.
Whether Trump would continue it was an unknown. Whether the Democrats would continue it was a known. And they wanted to punish people who were supporting a genocide. It's a fairly rational choice. My entire family didn't vote because of this and the friendliness with Cheney and neocons.
And how do you feel about the outcome? Do you think you would be happier having voted Harris?
Neutral I suppose. I think it was good that Democrats were not rewarded for supporting a genocide. No, Harris was a bad candidate in many other respects too, and even considering just this issue, I think it was the right decision.
I think this take comes from a place of western privilege. Biden has always been extremely pro Israel, more than even the average politician here. Biden refused to recognize the ICC war criminal ruling's on Bibi and Israel and also gave them whatever weapons they wanted. It doesnt really make a difference if Trump is more rude and annoying about it, neither of them like Alive Palestinians.
I mean, the whole thing went down under the Biden Presidency. If he thought getting those votes was important he couldve shut it down, it wouldnt even be the first time a president did that. Reagan reigned them in all the way in the 80s.
Some fantasy about how millions of leftists voters either boycotted the election or voted for Trump because of Biden’s position on Gaza. Complete nonsense of course, but it’s a popular conspiracy theory among certain democrats circles.
It was also funny to see democrats suddenly realizing that Arab Americans vote republican. They always have and they always will. Just like how Latino Americans, and generally most immigrants, will always vote republican too. Arab Americans are very culturally conservative. They would rather see a 100 Gazas than accepting that 2 gay men can get married.
The left pretty much falls into the same trap all around the world. Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning. The typical reaction is to fall back to elitism and claim those immigrants must be stupid somehow.
I don't think you mean leftists you mean liberals. Leftists ostensibly have a materialist understanding of the world, not idealist. Of course many immigrants are right-wing, the US exported counter-revolution globally during the 20th century.
I went to eat out at a Guatemalan restaurant the other day and they had a poster for a right-wing ultranationalist paramilitary group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Blanca
Is it shocking? Not at all. I have heard the same violent rhetoric from petit bourgeois in Colombia and in the USA because the exact same forces of reaction in the USA have been at work globally for decades.
> Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning
The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
> The claim that all immigrants are right-leaning is a generalization.
Yes, agreed. I probably saved a few words too much on that sentence. I should have thrown a "some" or "many" in there. OTOH, as a non-native speaker, I will loose every argument that ends up in native-speaker pedantery, so I am kind of unimpressed.
I would appreciate a broader examination of how this site politics function because no one here seems to understand the difference between liberals and leftists.
This site is mostly wealthy and older who have benefitted from the neoliberal status quo. It's why many commenters can shrug off the insane shit happening like opaque deportations of random people to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador, it only affects people on the margins who they think they are very far removed from.
In wealthy urban areas there are a lot of liberals who don't have a materialist basis for their views and are hypocritical, so the more reactionary on this site think that these pearl-clutching libs are the end all be all of left-wing politics. Meanwhile actual leftists dont really differentiate between ethnic supremacists and YIMBY liberals because they both ultimately support the same outcomes.
I am also from a petit bourgeois background but being younger I think it was very clear that the direction we were heading in was not sustainable. There is no path that allows for me to have stable finances (enough money to buy a house and pay for my parents retirement) and also be spiritually fulfilled. The only way I can save up the money to take care of the people around me is to sell my mind, body, and soul to the machine (even then who says the current administration wont tank the stock market and erase all my savings). I think even for Gen X'ers this was the case, it was just easier to keep their heads down since the polycrisis was still a few decades out and would not yet seem "real".
Even as a relatively successful zoomer I have to walk a fine line of grinding away at my day job, and doing the community-oriented work that fulfills me spiritually. The market signals that stuff like home ownership and having a family is not "efficient", so I don't bother.
Anyways, there's a real disconnect and I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes. If history is anything to go by they most likely never will.
> I'm not sure what it would take for the older and wealthier folks on here to open their eyes.
I think there are plenty of wealthy folks who understand the benfits of living in a more equal society, and that would gladly pay their fair share to live in such a society. The problem is they are not enough, and worse yet the middle class and what remains of the working class are actively pushing propaganda that goes directly against their own interests (perhaps because they think that one day they will too be millionaires).
Of course wealthy or "petit bourgeois" can be leftists or Marxists or whatever, they have typically made up the intelligentsia of most left-wing revolutions historically.
But the material interests of the wealthy align with the status quo that allowed them to acquire their wealth. This becomes less true as the "polycrisis" of climate change intensifies, since at some point there will be no future to enjoy, regardless of how much money you have.
Also I will argue that the reactionary propaganda comes from the top-down, not the bottom-up.
The wealthy are not trying to maintain the status quo though, they are actively trying to dismantle the remnants of the social/welfare state. I would argue that it is exactly that social system that allowed them to become wealthy, and they want to hold and hoard the wealth, stifling economic mobility and increasing the divide. This is stupid though as it increases social tensions and IMO puts them even more at risk of losing their wealth.
The reactionary propaganda does come from the top. Case in point: Elons “X the everything app” and him promoting afd - one has to wonder why he cares so much about immigrants. The answer seems simple, if they are not the target, he is.
> The wealthy are not trying to maintain the status quo though
I agree with everything you said, of course there are factions among the wealthy. Some want to keep doing business as usual liberalism, I think others anticipate climate change and want to pivot to a more violent system that allows them to horde even more wealth.
At the end of the day though, all factions of the wealthy have solidarity with each other when it matters.
Not stupid, just lacking class consciousness
I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.
I don't know what to tell you, I'm never going to be happy about people voting against my rights or about secret police disappearing people and ignoring the court system
You seem to be completely ignoring lynx97's actual point.
If you're not happy about those things, stop telling everyone who disagree with you how stupid they are and how they're literal Nazis. Then at least some of those who disagree with you on some issues will be less driven to vote for the people whose positions appall you.
Thanks for rewording my point. You pretty much nailed what I was trying to say.
Decades of name calling and refusing to compromise from the right and it’s the left with the bad attitude that’s dividing people?
Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.
If people judged name callers based on their actions then how did we get here?
people have absorbed so much american "the left is always evil and the right can do no wrong" propaganda they dont even realize it.
> If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi
Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
No. Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist. In fact, thats the core of my criticism. Political views are a spectrum, and you can't just push someone to the far right just because you disagree with them. This black-and-white thinking is doing far more harm then you might imagine.
> Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist
Their methods and their positions make them fascist, not their support or lack thereof for opposing positions.
Say, a coup attempt. Or someone in power talking about ignoring term limits. Or getting bribes and favouritism for corporations (corporatism is a heavy component of fascism). Or silencing opposition with brutal and illegal methods (such as kidnapping in the middle of the night by unmarked and masked men). Those all scream fascism, regardless of the fact that e.g. the person in charge of healthcare is an antivaxxer.
Minor quibble but wouldn’t it be a subset?
> Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.
Scratch a little deeper on the things popular Republican politicians and members of the current administration have been saying and promoting for the last few years.
Conspiratorial movements almost always end up at "it's The Jews", and so do theirs.
If you see talk about their opponents engaging in dark "rituals" involving child murder or abuse, you can be 100% sure you've found one that'll get you there. It's just blood libel, keeping reading and listening and you'll see that they're fully at that point before you've had to do much work. It's tedious.
True, but other than the "Jewish space lasers" brain worm lady, the others aren't outwardly anti-semitic. Unlike the Nazis who were very very much so.
So for now, I'm billing them as fascist.
sure this sounds bad, but we also currently have, in the USA, and administration who deports student protestors and does Nazi salutes. Ive been hearing about how "oh, the left just calls us Nazis for any opinion that differs from them" and now they are in power doing Nazi salutes. They were Nazis the whole time. No one is getting called Nazi for their opinions on tax rebates.
I agree, it's a huge trap. The right exploits leftists who insult normal people as dumb. It worked when they insulted George W Bush, who people identified with and found likeable, and was probably coached to bungle sentences despite likely not talking that way at Yale and Harvard; and when they insult Trump and his ideas, though he's perceptive and effective.
Many say it works because liberals now represent the professional-managerial class, who often come across to workers/poor as infuriatingly patronizing, slick and humiliating. Whereas many don't know who owns their big corporation, so they don't inspire such visceral feelings.
While some may argue that liberals aren't leftists (but are rather good-cop), nevertheless many leftists do this too. The dynamics are explained in Thomas Frank's book "Listen, Liberal", David Graeber's essay "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good", and Participatory Economics's coverage of the coordinator class.
Army of Altruists, by David Graeber: https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/
Thanks for the pointer, that was a very interesting read.
Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, you'll never convince someone swayed by bumper stickers to read and thoughtfully consider your 500-word ultra-concise argument for it.
"Vibes" and populism drive voter behavior. Cheap populist messages will always resonate at least as well as even an ultra-simplified "it's all of us versus the owners of capital". Us vs. Them is what populism is, but getting the right Them according to class consciousness is really hard (and it'll constantly be at risk of someone subverting it to something else, probably "the Jews and other child-sacrificing Evil Cultists in their sway" because it's usually that for some stupid fucking reason).
Even Bernie had to settle for the shitty and inaccurate "the 1%" to get even a little traction with class consciousness on a mass scale.
Right now outright conspiratorial thinkers are ascendant and doing the usual thing of being some of the elites (the capitalists) we should all be against, while painting everything as the fault of other elites (how are they differently elite? Well, follow their stupid threads of "evidence" and you always end up at blood libel, truly, it's so consistent that it's boring)
> Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular,
well yea, and Marx is a taboo, nothing new there. Those ideas can be repackaged though, in a way that won't make people foam at the mouth because of the "communist sounding words" (thinking of gary's economics for example). I agree with what you said, it's easier to package an "Anti-something" message, as we see with all the anti-immigrant messaging in the US and Europe, the Anti-Billionaire movement still has not gained even a fraction of the traction though.
Well, I dont remember any "immigrants for the poor" movements. But I know from personal experience that Lions Club and Rotary people actually sometimes do something useful for the poor with their money...
Given that context, do you really not understand that you shouldn't bite the hand that might feed you?
Immigrants are never going to feed the poor and disadvantaged.
The oh-so-bad-and-evil rich people might at least sometimes.
Immigrants are a net positive contributor to the welfare and pension system in the EU, they are statistically very likely to be the literal hand that feeds you when you will be old and in need of care.
I never said rich people are bad and evil, just that they should pay their fair share. For their own good too, to live in a more harmonious society, but maybe this is better.
Let me expand a bit on this. I personally think it is a very bad sign for our society that we are about to outsource the responsibilities around caring for the elderly to (mostly) female workers from neighboring countries to save a few bucks. Personally mostly because I find the prospect of a language barrier in care horryfing. I don't want to imagine how it must feel for those we already subject to this treatment to be cared for by someone who barely understands your language. In that context I find it hard to feel cozy about the future of care being "solved" by using immigrant workforce. Regarding pensions, all I can do is hope the statistics you are refering to are actually true. The cases I know about are heavily blocked on the language barrier when it comes to finding a "good" job. The best positive example I can think of are construction workers where it seems to work quite well that one or two guys speak the local language well enough to translate/coordinate with the rest of the crew. But most other cases of immigrants I know are actually pretty much blocked on the language issue. Only some are talented enough to learn a new language fluently in a few years, and some languages are actually pretty hard to learn. I count me in on that group. If I had to learn a new language at my age, I would probably do very badly. I didn't even pick up enough spanish during a 2 month trip through south america to do any interesting conversation. It would probably take me years to be able to respond to a random sentence from a native speaker of anything other then english and my native language. You might be able to survive with just English in the tech industry. But in pretty much every other industry, especially service, it is hard to find a job without good language skills. So most of the examples in that area that I am currently thinking of actually ended up depending on the welfare state for income instead of contributing to the pension system.
Nothing to feel cozy about, that was just an example of how immigrants do in fact help the poor and disadvantaged. In the same way that you mention how working class jobs are now also increasingly done by immigrants. Now if the rotary clubs want to donate money that’s great, but the fact remains that there is a redistribution of wealth happening before our eyes, and the direction is not wealthy -> immigrants, it’s middle class and below -> ultra rich. We are effectively subsidizing the profits of billionaires, while they skirt taxes and lobby for cutting even more funding to the welfare system. The economic divide between the super wealthy and the ever fading middle class is increasing year by year. How is this supposed to function?
I think they don't fall into the trap, and their position on migrants is formed not from the assumption that migrants have leftist views, but from the assumption that it is easier to make migrants dependent. And when someone is dependent, it doesn't matter what cultural views they are inclined to.
This is, of course nonsense. The data is clear that Latinos vote majority Democrat, though it was a smaller majority in this election than the previous.
They USED to, it was about 47% for Trump in 2024. Most Latinos I know in NYC voted for Trump.
Citation needed. A lot of the Latinos I know in NYC voted Trump. A few were Democrat voters who grew tired of being insulted by Democrats who casually lump Latinos into a big "left loving Latino pool" when they are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chileans, Ecuadorians, etc; Individuals with distinct cultures and backgrounds. Latinos are also heavily religious which is very influential as well.
Just Google Latino voting 2024. This isn't hidden information.
It's a record low for 2024 which is not insignificant. Next election will be interesting.
it was a huge anchor around the dem's neck, it was a huge conversation during the entire election. They were unable to convince people that Trump would be worse for Gaza than them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42793303
Here's a quote from the poll: 以下是民意调查中的一段引述：
So a country with 3% of the population of the US can throw the US into lawlessness or transform the US into a dictatorship? Pretty weak structure if that actually works.
3% living in swing states is plenty to change a presidential election.
It's more about how the US handled the situation in a country with 3% of the population and the impact of that on either marginal voters or voters for whom this was a major issue.
> how the US handled the situation in a country
As if the US were responsible for the whole world. Hey Megalomania, nice to meet you.
In this case, it wasn't for lack of action. The US is actively funding one side's dominance and hindering others from helping the other side.
I think most people who are complaining about this are not expecting the US to be responsible for anything and would be pretty happy if the US just sat out.
The point is how the US government handled the matter, and that the votes were affected by that (at least that's the claim).
The size of the Gaza conflict in absolute terms is entirely irrelevant, it easily could've been only 1 person, dominating the media.
https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1905249003291484566
Looking at those graphs I think one sees a war started by the weaker force and losing badly. A genocide in the same way as a bully being smacked in his face is bullying.
You realize genocide has nothing to do with graphs? It has to do with the leaders of the army accused saying they want to use starvation of the civilians of their own country as a tool of war among various other things. Since Israel does not recognize any Palestinian nation, and is the de facto occupier of the land the Palestinians live on, they are effectively civilians in the Israeli state
> You realize genocide has nothing to do with graphs?
Strange statement. Facts have everything to do with graphs. If you ignore facts, then your statements are empty of all meaning.
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> Mentions the war in Ukraine but does not mention the genocide
This is something I noticed a long time ago.
for example, here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790465
The author collected the reasons why Americans did not vote and analyzed all the not-about-genocide reasons, topics deemed inappropriate for discussion were self-censored by the author
that's a very interesting phenomenon, in Westworld, the hosts defensively disregard any evidence that challenges their true existence to prevent their worldview from collapsing:
"doesn't look like anything to me"
truly a great series
or the Uighur genocide, or many other mass murders around the world.
the Uighur genocide is the true genocide, it is happening in the real world with tons of pictures and videos as evidence
the Palestinian genocide is a fake genocide, it is propaganda pushed by Chinese and Russian to make Israel and the US looks bad
Genocide is a crime that consists of the combination of other crimes and a particular intent. Israeli politicians routinely declare this intent in mass media while they are committing actions that are listed in the description of the crime of genocide.
Russia has a tentative, informal truce with Israel on this issue, a 'you get atrocities in Palestine and we get atrocities elsewhere' kind of deal, and China aims to look neutral while supporting Israel for profit, e.g. in the Haifa harbour.
3% of israeli jews would consider it immoral to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip according to recent polls. It's a thoroughly genocidal society, as is obvious to anyone looking at israeli press and television. The israeli state is also very, very aggressive towards its neighbours, occupying parts of several of them, acting in breach of a peace agreement with another, participating in military exercises as a threat to yet another, and so on. It can do this due to US bullying of allies and enemies alike.
Soldiers in the IDF publicly admit to and document atrocities they're committing, voluntarily, which is well known and easy to confirm. I usually recommend looking through material collected by ytirawi and ireallyhateyou on xcancel.com, because it only takes a few seconds to start seeing photos of inexcusable acts and rhetoric.
is this sarcasm or irony?
> the genocide contributed to bringing Trump to power
Only because folks who refused to vote for Kamala said they could not stand her support of Israel policies :-) Like poor voters in the Midwest, you can always count on a certain electorate, to vote against their own interests and what they care about...
The left refuses to vote for the left because the left isn't crazy and confused enough about jihadis. Checks out.
As if Israel was the only reason to not vote for Harris. I dont remember much of her "platform" that actually would be in my interest. Make-believe-minority-politics isn't for the masses.
to be honest i only remember the supposed $20000 subsidy for first homebuyers, but how was the alternative in your interest, and is it working out as expected?
That's just it though, the democratic and republican parties ran on Israel apartheid maintenance since the end of the second world war. And even in the face of a genocide, the democrats as a national party held the line and refused to consider the crime against humanity unfolding before them. How is electing them supposed to be taken? Should they continue to ignore human rights violations? There was no other way to signal to democrats, as they would rather lose to fascist dictators.
20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians with full rights. Some were killed 7/10. There's a muslim party in the Knesset.
Remind me again: how many black parties had representation in apartheid South Africa?
You are confused because Israel HAS A apartheid state: the settlements (a small part of Israel in total). But that's not the same as Israel IS A apartheid state.
If you can't separate HAS A from IS A you will fail your Object Oriented Programming 101 course, but no one seems to notice it when talking politics :P
> There's a muslim party in the Knesset. here is how they are treated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avEhWwouQ8k&lc=Ugz8DeAmwrGXX...
>20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians with full rights. full rights to be evicted and have their homes demolished. https://www.newarab.com/news/land-ours-bedouins-fight-explus...
And even though they are treated badly, they still have voting rights. This is not Apartheid. It just isn't.
> full rights to be evicted and have their homes demolished
That case is being tried in courts. Such an action against blacks in South Africa would never have been in a court. Your sources prove my point.
The real Apartheid is not the israeli citizens. It's the people in the West Bank and Gaza. All of them should be israeli citizens too. Either that, or half a million settlers should get out. Can't have it both ways.
It's just settler colonialism. This is what it looks like, it's the same patterns and attitudes, complete with every act of resistance justifying further dehumanization and taking even more. Hell, the map of the West Bank even looks like it, it's just entirely that, top to bottom. The only difference is we're 80ish years past the point when nobody (except the colonized) minded if you were doing settler colonialism, so there's a little push-back.
> complete with every act of resistance justifying further dehumanization and taking even more.
"Resistance" oh please. Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization. DESPITE this Israel gave them Gaza to rule over themselves. What did they do? Steal from their own people, fire missiles weekly. And STILL Israel showed patience. There was a one-sided cease fire before 7/10, Hamas kept firing. Then after 7/10 the patience with Gaza came to an end.
Yea exactly.
Courts were an important part of south african apartheid, similar to how they are in Israel.
https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/cis/omalley/OMalleyWeb/03l...
As was suffrage, the bantustans were in large part a solution to the risk that voting would change the balance in the national parliament. What you could vote for and what the dominant group could do to your candidates was used to reproduce and reinvent apartheid, similar to how it is used in Israel.
Another similarity is that the dominant groups in both societies are propped up by protestant christians. Yet another is using colonial practices in other countries to fund the local economy, like emerald mines in Zambia in the case of South Africa and diamonds being a main export of Israel.
Legally Israel is engaged in apartheid, which is a crime. I'd argue this in itself makes the state of Israel illegitimate, i.e. armed and other resistance towards it is either a moral obligation or at least permissible, that is, the mainstream position of early liberalism.
That's all cool. But it's just standard deflection from the tens of thousands of deaths that the Biden administration directly enabled. And Arabs living in Israel doesn't magically make all the very public statements that Israel made (like that they wanted to level the city to the ground, and displace its population once and for all), repeatedly and throughout the entire Gaza operation just go away.
Israel didn't make those statements. Specific members of radical parties did. Imagine judging a country by their worst people. I bet your country would fare quite badly.
IDF generals did. Who else would you consider credible in representing what the IDF intended to do? Regardless I wasn't trying to make this about Israel's actions. But rather about what Biden (and didn't do) with Israel.
He didn't even go as far as condemn the radical parties that you mentioned. Absolutely no red line, or anything. Just complete carte blanche. Again, even Bush or Reagan didn't let Israel do whatever they want with no political repercussions. Israel knew back then that some lines couldn't be crossed without losing American support. With Biden, they did whatever they wanted, said whatever they wanted and took advantage of that.
Likud is a mainstream party in Israel. Their prime minister has been making genocidal and atrocious statements for a very long time. Mainstream television in Israel has been in overdrive to secure popular consent for absolutely obscene crimes for more than one and a half year.
80% of israeli jews in Israel approve of genocidal treatment of palestinians in the Gaza strip in the form of ethnic cleansing, while 14% believe the public statements about this from world leaders to be a distraction and 3% consider it immoral.
The broad israeli opposition, i.e. the large demonstrations in Tel Aviv and elsewhere and the politicians that support them, disagree with the government in which order to do things, not on whether the palestinians should be treated genocidally. They want to make the palestinians 'freyer', suckers, by signing any deal that brings israeli prisoners and hostages back and then continuing the genocidal process anyway. Meanwhile the government considers the prisoners and hostages better positioned in captivity, hence why they have been refusing negotiations, and then broke the ceasefire deal they went into earlier this year.
> genocidal treatment of palestinians in the Gaza strip in the form of ethnic cleansing
Well that made no sense. Genocide is killing people. Ethnic cleansing is moving people. Those are extremely different things. The entire Muslim world has already done a 99% ethnic cleansing of Jews, and where is the outrage? That's 10x the number of people that live in Gaza.
No, the crime of genocide can be perpetrated through non-fatal means, through "serious bodily or mental harm" as the convention puts it. Displacement, starvation, the eradication of homes and records, and so on, are common tactics applied by genocidal regimes.
The state of Israel systematically destroys educational institutions, libraries, archives, historical monuments and buildings, cemeteries, homes, hospitals, agrarian land, and more, according to leading politicians and pundits with the explicit intent to erase the palestinians from the land they're indigenous to. Israeli palestinians are called "arab" as part of this policy.
The ambition to establish a zionist colony and move the region's jews there caused a lot of outrage at the time, in part because the zionist movement had engaged in terrorism and other atrocities for decades already and wasn't exactly received as a welcome innovation in western antisemitism. It also came right after the influence of the previous innovation had subsided, i.e. nazi antisemitism.
US and british planes moved most of the jews from Iraq, Yemen and so on, so claiming that is was done by "the entire Muslim world" is blatantly false. In Indonesia the plight and flight of the jews was mainly caused by imperial Japan, who put pretty much the entire jewish community in labour camps. Today indonesian antisemitism is strongly connected to israeli atrocities and the antisemitic conflation of judaism and the state of Israel that zionists insist on.
Huh? I don't think it's the Muslim world that did the cleansing lol. At least in morocco most of the Jewish population left after Israel was founded, after the actual Holocaust in Europe. Not because of ethnic cleansing (though I agree they were treated badly, and I understand why they left).
But according to you the ethnic cleansing of the Jews was okay because it somehow wasn't a genocide right? Otherwise why would you be okay with what Israel is doing right now after saying that what israel is doing is just like the cleansing of the Jews?
And going back to the original point, are you saying that voting against the administration that enabled the gen- I mean ethnic cleansing of your population is somehow voting against your self interests? Talk about complete partisan blindsidedness.
You don't believe that Jews were ethnically cleansed from Muslim countries? Considering Egypt for example, what else would we call the expulsion of 25,000 Jews?
Morocco in particular didn't have an explicit state policy of ethnically cleansing Jews, but "treated badly" is a bit of an understatement, considering the pogroms and the government policy of essentially holding Jews for ransom.
Actually you are right, I was wrong about that. I was thinking about before Israel's foundation (as in, Jews lived in the Muslim worlds for a long time without ethnic cleansing). As for morocco, yes they were very much treated as worse than second class citizens.
So yeah, I agree that Jews were basically pushed to leave, and at some point were just directly kicked out and cleansed out of a lot of Muslim countries.
I just find it weird to justify Israel's actions by saying that what they are doing is "just ethnic cleansing" which is basically what the comment I was replying was doing. Not only is it super weird, but it's also telling to only apply that logic to Muslims. Can Jews just go and massacre Germans and Europeans because of the Holocaust? Then why justify the wholesale destruction of a Muslim city with that?
I didn't say "just" ethnic cleansing. I said that ethnic cleansing is different from genocide. Because it is. We should be careful to use the correct words.
In the sense mass murder is different from genocide, sure. It can be an expression of a genocidal regime but in some case it might not be.
But since you refuse to explain why you want to make this distinction and how it applies to the treatment of the palestinians it doesn't seem like care, it seems more like you want to bikeshed.
I mean you said that Israel is commiting an ethnic cleansing, and that you still support Israel. Or did I misread the comment?
This is such a weird and ahistorical view.
The jews in Egypt didn't have much problems with their neighbours until nazism and zionism arrived.
'The bad muslims mistreated the jews when they came under influence of german thought, typical muslims, a european would never'.
Jews lived in Morocco since the first century AD, with the exception of the Fez massacre in 1033, mainly in peace. It's where jews could find immediate refuge when the christians drove them out of al-Andalus. 1948 onwards there were anti-jewish riots in Morocco, in response to jews leaving to presumably take part in the zionist atrocities in Palestine and the state of Israel.
Today anti-jewish and anti-zionist sentiment in Morocco is typically tied into anti-monarchist views, the king is perceived to be a traitor and possibly controlled by some supposed jewish conspiracy. You'll find a rather clear expression of this in e.g. Ahmed Rami, the infamous exiled antisemite, who combines distinctly nazi antisemitism with a moroccan muslim nationalism.
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I take it you wanted to start your list after islam arrived, but failed and doesn't know the muslims didn't arrive until 639 or so? And that's why you left out the roman pogroms?
It's for good reason sharia prescribes legal protections for jews, christian romans and byzantians persecuted jews incessantly.
Did you take your list from https://medium.com/@Ksantini/the-list-of-crimes-committed-by... ? And just assume it's correct and doesn't mix in a lot of christian pogroms against jews?
Edit: Zionism is mainly a protestant christian movement, it's a lot about historical revisionism regarding christian antisemitism. Most of the members are christians, the funding comes mainly from christians, the weapons are provided by christian countries, it's based on a naive distinctly protestant (i.e. 'literal' and cherry picked) reading of the Bible, and so on.
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But you didn't, you showed some examples of christians massacring jews and didn't explain in any of the examples how it was islamic religion rather than e.g. politics that caused the murder.
I still have the impression you just Ctrl-F:ed 'egypt' in a random list of supposed muslim on jew violence without looking into whether it was truthful or the historical context.
What do you think the significance of Khaybar is? Are you unaware that the story goes something like this, Muhammad and his group were established in Medina, and had peace treaties there except for a group of medinese jews in Khaybar, which they besieged for some time, until they signed a treaty with them where they left them in peace in exchange for a tax in the form of dates? This is roughly at the same time as the first muslims got a peace treaty with the meccans and were allowed to begin with pilgrimage.
Usually these events are retold as evidence of Muhammad's ability to quickly resolve violent conflict and enter into diplomatic relations with their neighbours without a lot of bloodshed, but you don't seem to be aware of this. The battle of Khaybar saw something like fifteen thousand from jewish tribes in Khaybar against a tenth of that in a very brief siege and some skirmishes, with only like a hundred dead and fifty injured. Quick and relatively bloodless, and other peace treaties were also negotiated as a result.
It's also very weird to recall battles in the early 600s to excuse more than a century of terrorism and other atrocities in recent times. Roughly as absurd as the serb nationalist cult of the battle of Kosovo Polje. Are you into that stuff as well?
ethnic cleansing
noun
the mass expulsion or killing of members of one ethnic or religious group in an area by those of another
How is not voting for the administration that enabled and did absolutely nothing to stop the genocide of their relatives or community in Gaza voting against their self interest?
You realize that the deaths that happened in Gaza are probably more important than whatever grievances you have against Trump for some people? We are talking about tens of thousands of deaths, directly enabled by the previous administration (not only politically but with direct military shipments of the bombs that killed said people). But Muslim lives are typically completely worthless for a large part of the American population so your comment doesn't really surprise me.
You think Trump is going to do better? Looks to me like he is doubling down on it.
No, that's not what I said. But that doesn't mean that people would actively vote for the previous administration. They just won't vote at all.
And I'm not sure what you mean by doubling down. Biden was basically letting Israel do whatever it wanted to do. Absolutely did nothing for more than a year of bloodshed. Doing anything (like direct discussions with Hamas, bypassing israel) is better than just doing nothing. Even if Trump is a drooling, die hard supporter of Israel.
Like if Trump did what Biden let Israel do, I don't think the Muslim population would've been surprised. But even the reddest/war hawks of presidents(Reagan, Bush) never let Israel just have a complete carte blanche. Yet Biden, a supposed ally of the community, did.
A supposed ally of the community?
Yes, Democrats have been historically seen as the party that cared the most about Muslim interests in the US. Just like it is the party that traditionally gets the most support from the black community for example.
Again, this complete disregard for Muslim life could've been expected from Bush or whatever. But even he wouldn't have let Israel go this far without some sort of faint condemnation or call for restraints. Biden didn't. Especially since Biden wasn't some sort of toothless president, we saw how he reacted to the Russian invasion, and how firm he was against Russia. I guess it showed how Ukrainian lives seemed to be worth much more for his administration, whereas the lives of Gaza civilians wasn't even worth a stern condemnation.
Supporting Muslim interests and also supporting women's rights and gay rights.
No conflict of interests there.
The interests of the Muslim community in the US. Not of Islam in general.
So the Muslim community in the US have no relation to Islam in general.
Hmm..
Catering to a population doesn't inherently means that you push for all of its beliefs.
Is any politician that supports Israel to gain support from Jewish voters pushing for Judaism or Jewish (religious) values? Do you think that Judaism, the actual religion, is any more progressive with say, feminism, than Islam?
How do you think the treatment of women and gays in Israel compares to that in Muslim countries?
Why does it matter? Wr are discussing religious groups in the US. The comment I replied to said that catering to American Muslims doesn't make sense if you are a progressive because Islam isn't. But somehow catering to Jews (which I know isn't just a religious group) is different. So I'm asking, do you actually think that Judaism is more progressive than Islam? Again, the comment I replied to explicitly said that the community somehow equals the religion and its beliefs.
And I don't know if women have it particularly worse in Turkey than in Israel. Same goes for gay people, though I'd agree that I'd rather be gay in Israel that in Turkey or any other Muslim country. Not sure why that matters in the context of comparing the religions themselves though.
you could replace muslim with any other religion and that statement would still hold true
> I guess it showed how Ukrainian lives seemed to be worth much more for his administration, whereas the lives of Gaza civilians wasn't even worth a stern condemnation.
Biden is a self-described Zionist, so his politics in that regard are crystal clear.
youre right and theyll hate for it
Biden was in charge the entire time if he wanted people to think his party was better on Gaza he shouldve been better on Gaza. They dealt with a massive protest wave in blue staes and they told everyone who cared about Gazans to get fucked, then they lost. Its not hard to understand.
this just the same shitty elitism that everyone hates. Oh those dumb midwesterns, they shouldve voted for our genocide.
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I have no idea how many of those giants Hegel actually influenced. The list covers so many famous intellectuals that I suppose the only 20th Century writer worth reading is Dale Carnegie; he's the only guy left!
Interested to know why you think Foucault or Lacan are ‘deviants’, do you mean that in the nazi sense, or something else?
Whenever I see such random list, I know that the person hasn't read any of these authors.
That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of liberal values - however the fact that he was in a position of power at all was because he came from a rather backwards society that didn't champion liberal values. It is a shame the Chinese Republicans didn't manage to take, but to say there was a lot going on in China at any given moment would be an understatement.
At any point in the chain of events people could move towards liberalism and market economies, then become more prosperous. We've even got case studies where that was tried - the USSR - and a lot went wrong but it still went much better than most of the other experiments out of the 1900s. China too, eventually, where we can't really say what the end result is going to be but it has been an amazing journey so far.
The issue wasn't with these thinkers, it looks a lot more like any deviation from liberalism is a terrible mistake and it is really only a competition for who can be most liberal on the important issues (which, unfortunately, are only revealed with a little hindsight).
> That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of liberal values. however the fact that he was in a position of power at all was because he came from a rather backwards society that didn't champion liberal values.
Considering that the "liberal values" were the ideology upon which China was previously attacked and destroyed by western powers, and that the KMT, under more liberal values did the Shangai Massacre against the comunists, ending their alliance, this would be improbable. Yeah, history show how progressive is the liberal ideology and their champions...
Always interesting how the Anglo world never really got into Hegel, I guess it's their lack of real philosophical spirit that explains it. They never really got passed Hume's empiricist reflexes.
They did get into Hegel for a bit, but the subsequent developments in math, language, etc. (what is now called Analytic Philosophy) kind of wiped out the interest in them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_idealism
But yeah, you could probably argue that the empiricist approach never quite went away. Even today, analytic philosophy (which is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon) is notoriously uninterested in politics and "big society" questions.
There are important exceptions, such as C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, and currently Robert Brandom.
William Lawvere is also a post-hegelian.
> Most thinkers and ideologues that represent what is rotten in modern society have to thank Hegel.
You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get to the self-consciousness and then you'll see, it all makes sense in hindsight
(like the preface to the phenomenology, this comment will only make sense once you've read the whole damn thing)
This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation is nothing more than railing against intellect itself.
My conjecture isn't Hegel is single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation. After all I don't have a reason to think he intended that, nor do I think civilisation will necasarily fall. Most villains of the thought, ideologues and philosophers are basing their operas on Hegel's.
All I am saying Hegel established a framework which eased the works of some scum.
You might enjoy Rick Roderick's "Masters of Suspicion" where he talks about the influence (and perceived influence) of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and some other individuals credited with "changing the world".
This is likely a use of "pedant" in the more precise pre-vulgarization sense, probably, with a stronger suggestion of "school teacherly" or "insularly academic" than "nit-picking know-it-all". Might help readers follow it.
Most likely they won't, since Roderick openly and efficiently argues against "paleoconservatives" and the like.
It is precisely the opposite.
A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste.
If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton every time a vase falls off a shelf?
In hindsight, naming my cat Newton may have been a bad idea.
Newton is not responsible for gravity because he didn't create it.
Nevertheless, as an entity with mass Isaac Newton was complicit in contributing towards gravity’s tyrannical effects. In fact, his corpse continues to exert a gravitational pull to this day. /s
Karl Marx isn't responsible for anything that happened in the 20th century. People have individual responsibility for their actions, it doesn't matter where you got the idea from. Ascribing e.g. crimes of stalinism to Marx is actually terrible idea, it absolves the people who did these crimes of their own moral agency. Ideas do matter (as Gramsci has shown by example), but the moral responsibility is on the implementors.
But just out of curiosity, what exactly Marx said that you deem so dangerous? Can you show some quotes?
> Everything that exists deserves to perish.
Well, we can start with this problematic statement. Taken to its literal conclusion, it's not surprising to think it could end up with mass graves. Granted, it originated from Mephistopheles, but Marx wasn't being poetic in his recitations.
I am not really interested in a bad faith debate. I take it you're quoting this passage:
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s Faust, Part One.]
Can you explain, in your interpretation, what was Marx trying to say?
Aha, wise potentates.
Any accounting scheme which assigns Marx blame for the consequences of his poorer ideas, has to assign far more to "wise potentate" believers. Or even people who unironically use words like "wise potentate" at all.
> If ideas matter, then spectacularly bad ideas should have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your point.
Fully concur
The fact that people still hang on to the outdated epistemology of the dialectic is absurd given the domination of empiricism in real world
on whom do you put the crimes of capital?
Uhh, why someone like Sartre or Foucault is on this list, equal to Lenin or Mao? It's hard for me to see how they as existentialists were on par of them; and if so, ought we blame Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky too?
I am asking genuinely on your stance because I don't see why you consider them to be evil.
I don't think the list makes any sense. It's just part of movement where some try to blame all the evil of the world past and present on intellectual/philosophers, that would have perversed society and academics by their ideas. The root of evil being Hegel it seems and all figures that remotely connect to him. I think the reason here is Sartre was part of the communist party in France, for some time.
Yeahhhh, Sartre political takes were something. As a Pole I do have distaste for him because he was influential person behind banning a French translation of memoirs from gulags as that'd "offend Soviets".
Still, at best I see him as a naive person, not evil.
You missed Gentile off the list, Neo Hegelian and “godfather of fascism”.
Hegel is useful to me as a shortcut to knowing that anything or anyone deriving from his ideas is awful. I seem to recall Bertrand Russell didn’t seem fond either, Hegel’s entry in the History of Philosophy certainly wasn’t a glowing review.
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Yes, we could organize gatherings where we purify ourselves of such works of degenerate literature by gathering all the copies we can find and burning them /s
Just don't burn the wrong type of books
https://xkcd.com/750/
That's the wrong way - the way of the likes of 'fascists' and 'anti-fascists' alike - to go at that problem. A better way is to point out where Hegelian thought can lead and has led in the past. No books need to be burned, more books need to be published and read while educational institutions should stop pushing books which promote the destructive aspects of Hegel's thoughts. Yes, that means that Howard Zinn should not be used as the historian of choice in the USA, that all the different 'Marxist critique/perspective on ...' studies are not the ones to base the curriculum on and that terms like 'decolonising Shakespeare' [1] should become the exception rather than the rule when dealing with the cultural inheritance of 'the West'.
I understand that you were trying to sound edgy but the effort falls flat in the light of the many examples of 'book burnings' - between quotes because physical book burnings are out of vogue - by the authoritarian progressives who slowly marched through the institutions of academia. National socialists censored books by burning them, international socialists censor them by 'decolonising' the curriculum [2] and the library [3].
[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-audacity-of-decoloni...
[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=decolonising+the+library
I appreciate the thought put into this reply, but there's been some sort of miscommunication. An /s tag, like the one at the end of my previous comment, is meant to indicate sarcasm. I'm about as edgy a person as Donny Osmond.
Exactly my view. People should be more educated, not less.
while educational institutions should stop pushing books which promote the destructive aspects of Hegel's thoughts
Well, I mean, you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are..
um..
"consistent with scripture" so to speak.
There is a difference between 'pushing' those books and taking their message into account in the curriculum. I did not call for a ban on such books - just before the part you quoted I said No books need to be burned, more books need to be published and read - but they should not be the leading voices.
> you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are.. [..] "consistent with scripture" so to speak.
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and similarly biased publications can be considered scripture [see also 1] in 'progressive' circles, especially those found around educational institutions. They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim but probably not in the way you intended.
[1] https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1007/978-1-349-...
They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim
I'm confused?
That seems to prove exactly what I was saying. That if you only allow kids to read the books that are "consistent with scripture" they are less educated. I'll take this opportunity to add that making any "scripture" the leading voices, leads to less educated kids.
Your ideas will lead to the "dumbing down" of a society. I mean, maybe it will be a society sufficiently dumb enough to accept the doctrinal import of your preferred scriptures? But it'd still be a pretty dumb society.
Yes, you are clearly confused if you think not using 'scripture' (as in ideologically driven course material) as base for the curriculum will lead to 'dumbing down' of society. Maybe you should read again what I wrote and rewrite or remove your confused and confusing answer? Here's what we discussed, in order:
YOU: Well, I mean, you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are.. um.. "consistent with scripture" so to speak.
[ here you state using scripture (or books consistent with it) are a poor base for a curriculum ]
ME: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and similarly biased publications can be considered scripture [see also 1] in 'progressive' circles, especially those found around educational institutions. They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim but probably not in the way you intended.
[ here I state "indeed is a poor base, just look at the disastrous results achieved by using 'scripture'" ]
YOU: I'm confused? That seems to prove exactly what I was saying. That if you only allow kids to read the books that are "consistent with scripture" they are less educated. I'll take this opportunity to add that making any "scripture" the leading voices, leads to less educated kids. Your ideas will lead to the "dumbing down" of a society. I mean, maybe it will be a society sufficiently dumb enough to accept the doctrinal import of your preferred scriptures? But it'd still be a pretty dumb society.
[ here you repeat what I said in different words and directly after that claim that 'my ideas' (i.e. not using scripture as the base for a curriculum) will lead to 'dumbing down' of society ]
Where you probably go wrong is in the assumption that not using 'scripture' as the base for a curriculum means the doctrines of that scripture will not be discussed in any way. This is clearly mistaken since a non-doctrinal curriculum by necessity needs to explain those doctrines to explain where it differs from the doctrinal versions. Howard Zinn is a Marxist who does not like western society and culture and would like to see it succumb to some revolution or other - a doctrinal position. There is probably a similarly biased Conservative nationalist author somewhere who thinks western society and specifically the North American iteration of it is the pinnacle of human development but I can no think of a name since his books are clearly not part of the curriculum where Zinn's are. Both these authors, Zinn and the non-name Conservative nationalist produced heavily biased works which are not suitable as a base for a curriculum. That does not mean they should not be discussed, it just means they should not be leading the discussion. Reading the Communist Manifesto does not make you a Communist after all, reading Mein Kampf does not make you a National Socialist, reading the Quotations of Chairman Mao does not make you a Maoist. I say read them all and discuss their influence, show where they went wrong but also acknowledge that these works are the products of time and circumstance which created the conditions for their impact - the exploitation of industrial workers in the beginning of the industrial revolution, the single-sided blame for the first world war being put on the German Empire and the burden of the Versailles treaty weighing down the German populace, the succession of unpopular imperial dynasties and the power vacuum left after the 1911 revolution in China which the KMT/GMD failed to fill which create the stage for the next revolution.
Is there a name for the approach I favour? I think there is: the liberal arts curriculum [1]. Of course I'm referring to the original ideas behind this curriculum, not the 'modern' bastardised ideologically driven implementation of it. If it is called 'liberal' in the USA it is most likely not related to the original ideas behind either liberalism or the liberal arts curriculum - it is more likely to be the antithesis of it by being doctrinally rigid and closed to viewpoints outside the desired narrative.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberal-arts
starting with Clean Code
History stopped being useful and became a meaningless recreation when it moved away from the fact that facts are absolute, not relative to the observer.
You're relying on something that's not a fact, to make this post.
The fact that people disagree with something does not make it false.
Find me an absolute point, and I'll move the world.
What strikes me is how much of these current geopolitical events are driven by singular individuals whose current inclinations were shaped by their very arbitrary past encounters. For example, if you take the current US administration's hostility towards Europe. That might just be the result of the Vice President being at Yale and encountering a few snobby children of European old money, and they might have been a bit too mean to him, and that might be the sole reason he has so much antipathy towards the whole of Europe.