crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
8mo ago
I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.
A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.
Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.
Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.
But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
From what my admittedly lacking research tells me is that there was an initial, 'strong' version of the constitution that did enshrine them as rights, but the finance department took one look at the figures for such a welfare program and said 'no way, we can't afford it.'
So they were degraded into nonbinding 'directive principles', so it has the weight and pomp of one's Amazon wish list. But still, it is a relic of the strong Catholicism that was once strong in Ireland, which the government is now desperately trying to remove.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
It requires a certain mindset that is obsessed about map-painting and an interest in history.
If you read those books and then proceed to completely ignore their lessons and substitute a vague Fukuyamist neoconservatism, of course you wouldn't learn anything. I would say that the American political establishment have a desire for both lengthy wars and wars of ideological vagueness and impossible aims (what does spreading democracy even mean, in an ethnically divided country?) that both books warn against.
If, on the net, reading those books turns you into someone who disagrees with the ghouls in the State Department, then it's a net win.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
Watership Down. Or, if they have a higher tolerance for reading, Dune. (Those who are already playing Warhammer 40k can read Starship Troopers.) If they're more of a nonfiction type Machieveli's The Prince is concise and relevant. Art of War and On War are good for leadership.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
I'd like to chime in from my lurker position and say that this is a good thing, in that this forum was obviously not for him - insomuch as he resolutely did not want to have his mind changed. Not knowing him personally, I'd say that my experience with him is that he resolutely held his ground and never conceded any point. Even if his opponent struck a point, he would ignore it.
And that's fine - if you have consequentialist priors. If you're convinced something is good and is the basis of your moral reality, then evidence and argumentation to the contrary will seem like sophistry. But he was made by his times. The simple fact is that it's been a decade since SSC first started going. His Bush-era anecodotes and rambles are very dated. Quite simply, he became old. Everything is postmodern to him because it is.
He was no longer 'with it'. As Simpsons says, it happened to him. It will happen to all of us.
And by God's grace, I hope I will carry myself with more dignity.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I think the attitude of 'everything is idpol except for this one particular issue which I've pulled out of the Dirty Bourgie Left and is sacred above all others' is the most annoying part. If he was a doctrinaire orthodox Marxist-Leninist who scorned it as false consciousness it would be still annoying but it would be logically consistent.
But instead he twists himself into a loop trying to justify it. Has anyone asked him, given the choice between transgender rights and utopic Communism, which would he choose? I think he'd twist in the wind in pure agony.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I can only comment on its aesthetic qualities but it very much feels like a raising, a visual bump in the text that is not as grating as italics or bold but still noticable. Kind of like braille.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
'legitimate victimhood?'
Are you like, the edgy version of the Republican boomer that says 'Democrats are the real racists?' 'Wokes are the real oppressors?'
If you define wokeness by that parameter it means on some level you've functionally accepted the priors of critical theory and therefore are not particularly based in any aspect. Cringe indeed.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Seconded. This seems important enough to get a megathread for - if the Rittenhouse and Floyd 'events' were noteworthy enough to partition, this seems surely equal to that bar.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*
*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.
and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.
But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.
Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.
Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."
Which is a... worldview.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Well, of course. It is implicit.
But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.
Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There is some marginal benefit to being the child of a rich person. (Otherwise, there would be no mechanisms to preserve elite status over generations other than by gene transfer.) I think if people were given the choice of being the only child of a Sub-Saharan African or the hundredth (thousandth?) child of Elon Musk, they'd choose the latter every time.
My point being is that it doesn't matter how affluent the society as a whole is: so as long as hedonic escalation is a thing, people will always resent and have jealousy for people more well off then them (even if, relative to everyone else, they are wealthier than everyone on the planet.) We are nowhere near that state in the modern day: the ones with the greatest chip in their shoulders against the 1% are the fantastically wealthy American underclass.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).
It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I attribute the absence of natural rights from the discussion as the appalling dearth of political education in the modern demos rather than its irrelevancy. Ask the average voter where their rights come from and you'll get unhelpful answers (God? the State? being a 'decent' human being?). The degradation of rights into entitlements given by governmental fiat is something to be fought against.
Although it may be irrelevant in people's day to day lives it is of the greatest importance to the philosophy of government, and therefore its character.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I disagree!
Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.
I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?
Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
It's a slightly gamified version of D&D 5e. An accurate representation of the roleplaying game, but it diminishes how fun it is. (The lack of simulataneous turns is the real killer.)
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