toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
1yr ago
Not wrong, but this could have been said, with equal truth at any time in the last 100 years.
Most of those civil servants are pretty ordinary centre-lefties. It is exceptional, and disturbing that an extremist is not only at high level but is so bold about it.
toadworrier
1yr ago
What makes you think she's white?
Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."
toadworrier
1yr ago
So, contra Harrington, you would say progress is a coherent concept. But you would deny that we've had any net progress in last two decades or so?
I wouldn't strongly disagree with that assesment.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In Bertrand Russell's chapter about Locke, he says something like "Given a choice between being inconsistent and being absurd, Locke will always chose to be inconsistent".
Bentham however, was not like that.
toadworrier
1yr ago
It can be more than "vague centre-right". America is growing some smart-but-hard right wing doers. DeSantis is the obvious one, but not the only one. Then there's activists like Chris Rufo who can work through whatever politician has power.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.
toadworrier
1yr ago
(he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines)
It's working!
toadworrier
1yr ago
Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions,
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Can you link some of your arguments. It fits my priors, but I'd like to see the reasoning behind it.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language
I hope you are also communicating with him about what matters for his child.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Calvin's Geneva and Yankee Boston
These are two notorious theocracies. They had the advantage that they were also bearers of new ideas that were on the up. But those ideas only came to be of importance in the context of a healthier, non-theocratic society.
toadworrier
1yr ago
indictment of the American right, that there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
Doing that sort of shit on abortion clinics certainly has saved any babies. If anything, it's done the opposite.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Community organizing, meetups, and church ladies have genuine value, but are not exactly scalable. You want probably 5 of them in a group of 100.
Nah, you want a participatory pitchfork where every one turns up regularly to the local volksrat. I don't expect such a thing, but it's what we need.
toadworrier
1yr ago
The problem is that it's defense of humanities professors was exactly the sort of meaningless pastiche that you would expect if it was a pure symbol manipulator. Now you could argue that it sounds very much like the real arguments that would come out of the mouths of real humanities professors. But that just means Hlynka wins on both sides.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I think that it also correctly pointed out that this whole thing vs symbol manipulator distinction is a lot more complicated.
While I instinctively believe things are more complicated than Hlynka's distinction, I became less and less convinced of this the more I waded through Bing's verbiage on the matter.
toadworrier
1yr ago
And this is why the focus on the Civil Rights Act as a new constitution is a bit skewed.
Elites have been attacking the US constitution ever since the Alien and Sedition Acts. More importantly, by the Progressive Era there was a well-established ideology that was hostile to the way classical liberal constitutionalism interfered with energetic technocratic government action. This is why FDR wanted to pack the court.
There's a certain amount of stupid in the CRA, but the 1960's had the virtue that people were returning to the idea that individual had inherent rights that ought to be vindicated against the higher "wisdom" of the powers that be. America's strong 1st Amendment jurisprudence emerges from the same era.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. ... So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find
So you answer your own question!
toadworrier
1yr ago
Having said that the Beeb is an interesting construct. Its funding mostly comes from the public by way of a government law for the License fee.
Just because you call it ship money a licence fee, doesn't mean it isn't a tax. The government impose it.
However its existence is part of a Royal Charter which mandates its independence from the government itself.
More importantly the BBC is perfectly willing to attack the government. But by "government" here, I mean the democratically elected institutions of the state. The BBC does however loyally represent (and is part of) the permanent state institutional structure.
So is it accurate to say it is government funded? Kind of yes, kind of no
Yes, and every kind of yes.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
toadworrier
1yr ago
(Though given how much they gained from Mabo, which found Indigenous agriculture and sedentary lifestyles on one island off the coast of Australia and extended a certain level of land rights across the whole country, waiting for courts to interpret in their favor is not a bad strategy
The courts just noted that Terra Nullius was bullshit, and that there was pre-existing land-law just like in any other conquered territory. The courts also made clear that Australian governments could override that land law and extinguish Native Title with little more than a wave of the pen.
But Parliament, under Paul Keating decided pass Native Title Act which went and bolstered native title claims around the country.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I came back to the country a few years ago to find Labor and Liberal in some tedious stouche that I can't even remember; except I was astonished to find that Derren Hinch and Pauline Hanson were acting like the only grownups in the room.
I thought that was just one weird freak of probability never to happen again, but now I am not so sure. The ONP is starting to look smarter than everyone else, if only because Pauline is merely stupid while the rest of the polity is actively anti-intelligent.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Sounds about right. But I'm thinking about what would constitute a hard calculus exam while still being "just calculus".
I once bombed an exam a bit easier than the one I described, and it was actually the only subject I failed in Uni.
Are people starting to drink at cricket matches like Aussies?
Traditionally at that Gabba, people will be downing schooners of XXXX all day long. They get pretty smashed, but it's still only 4%ish so it's manageable.
(Nowadays they have better beer at the Gabba, but I don't approve. If it's not XXXX, it doesn't taste like Cricket).
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