WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
You remember correctly, but it was a matter of a few hours and visibly an effect of poor drafting, not a deliberate attempt to give him future immunity. The span of time was negligible. (I suppose this doesn't disprove the theory that the mistake was deliberate, and intended as a benign-looking battering ram through which to set a precedent for genuine future immunity. But I'm loath to ascribe to machiavellian malice what can be explained by incompetence.)
As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.
You write:
Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism.
My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?
The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.
A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.
So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.
But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.
Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.
If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.
And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.
Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
To be more exact, NelsonRushton made that distinction, or in any case, affected to make it. I was questioning whether he really believed in it.
But if we define "wokeness" as the cancel-culture apparatus and associated phenomena, then it seems clear to me that they can be "disambiguated". Here I stand, living proof. The temptation of blood-soaked revolutions is one of mankind's greatest ethical pitfalls, but reducing all ideologies used by power-hungry revolutionaries to superficial excuses seems absurd. Taking the French Revolution, surely a majority of Americans would describe themselves as anti-monarchists, and that doesn't inevitably make them Robespierre's useful idiots.
My view is that any violent revolution can be hijacked by power-hungry sociopaths. This is a very good reason not to start violent revolutions, no matter how right you feel. But it is not a reason to unilaterally condemn or ignore any political or moral position that some people, at some point in history, have been tempted to start a revolution about. I should hope that things like the abolition of hereditary monarchies and the abolition of feudal serfdom are recognized by a majority of Americans today - indeed, by a majority of the developed world - as morally-justified causes. Their righteousness is precisely why they were able to generate mass popular support the nearest charismatic sociopaths found themselves motivated to redirect for their own ends. It has no bearing on the underlying question of right and wrong.
That, I never doubted. That is why you are in fact a right-winger. As a true liberal I do not begrudge you - or indeed Nelson! - the right to that opinion.
However, Nelson's rhetoric implied that he had special animus for the medium in and of itself, distinct from his dislike for progressives qua progressives. He wrote wrote of wokeness as a specific phenomenon which it was urgent to quell, while he is happy to live-and-let-live with non-'woke' progressives (who he explicitly believes needn't be "natural enemies" to conservatives "in a sane world").
The impetus of my post was as follows. If this truly represents Nelson's beliefs and priorities, then it seems to me that he could and should, for his own side's interest, enter into an alliance of convenience with principled progressives like myself in the war against runaway political-correctness/cancel-culture/"wokeness". Then we can slay the dread beast and go back to fighting each other civilly on the object-level questions of policy and morality. This is self-evidently the rational thing for both of us to do, particularly if, as Nelson also argued in the OP, most progressives aren't actually pro-"woke" but are just going along with it out of apathy and fear.
And yet - I observed - Nelson, and people like Nelson, seemingly can't stop themselves from letting their object-level disagreements with progressivism into arguments which they profess are only about the meta-level. Conclusion from this progressive: either
1- for the sake of a few incidental jabs which have no bearing on his overall argument, Nelson is stupidly discouraging us progressives from entering into an alliance that would be mutually satisfactory
or
2- he isn't really serious about this business of reserving special hatred for cancel culture and being willing to play fair with progressives who play fair in return.
If it's #1, people like Nelson should reconsider their argumentative strategy; if it's #2, they should stop lying. It's wrong. And serves no purpose in a place like the Motte where they would face no backlash for stating that they just hate progressivism itself, as you have done.
It seems that you consider fighting radical progressive ideas ("the message") to be as high a priority as fighting cancel culture etc. ("the medium"), meaning you have no incentive to enter into an alliance with a Reform Progressive. If you admit as much then I don't have any intellectual disagreement with you on how you're conducting yourself - only the ordinary object-level disagreements about the nature of good and evil and all those superficial little details.
Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.
But that brings me to my more politically-relevant point, which is that I don't recognize a difference between the right to life and the right to healthcare; one is the implementation of the other.
There is, of course, an enduring moral question of action-vs-inaction. Granting that I have a moral obligation not to drown my fellow man, do I also have an obligation to save him from accidental drowning if I happen to be passing by? But I think the "good Samaritan" question doesn't apply in the case of the State which has actively pledged to proactively protect its citizens' lives. I, personally, may or may not have a duty to intervene to save a random stranger from drowning; but then, I am not generally regarded as having a moral obligation to save random strangers from being mugged at gunpoint, either. The State has pledged to safeguard my life, and already takes measures to proactively save me from being shot or battered or strangled. In my book, that should extend to proactively saving me from disease, starvation, and exposure.
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