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Is that true for everyone, or just for leftists?
I see the right/left divide as basically being one of hierarchy/'equity', and since equity isn't a reality-based ideology it's gonna be prone to backfiring, yeah. But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem, at least until those elites hit upon the idea of organizing the masses against competing elites on grounds of equity, at which point we're back to leftism.
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
It's a thorny issue to be sure and relies upon what could be called ineffability to work, i.e. there's no satisfactory intellectual answer from just about any standpoint.
A Christian should be obedient to his priest and the church hierarchy in most cases. However, the hierarchy is made up of humans, who can and do go wrong. At the individual scale this can be devastating and 'should I ignore my priest about this' is a very uncomfortable question for a Christian to ever have to ask. The reality is that most people aren't really equipped to make that call. Ideally the problem is fixed by those priests being accountable to bishops and so on, but in practice the whole system can and does fail. Then again, at one point the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops all decided to reunite with the Church of Rome under the Pope, and the laity stood firm and told them 'no', and the hierarchy demurred.
What we have is a system where we all understand that human components sometimes fail, sometimes en masse, and yet we believe that Christ in His capacity as the head of the Church makes it work out anyway. It's gotten us this far.
Example?
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
(Context for today's lucky 10,000)
Ultimately he has to follow his conviction, as we all do.
Probably my fault but I'm not grasping the relevance.
And my conviction is that trans-women are women in every way that matters outside the bedroom and the doctor's office, that if the mind and body disagree on whether someone is werman or woman it is better to bring the body in line with the mind rather than vice versa, that if two people engage in coitus the morality or immorality of their act does not depend on their genders, and that parents of teenagers developing same-gender attractions or children with genital dysphoria do not have an inalienable entitlement to force or gaslight them into a heteronormative mould.
Human actions, including those that appear to go against nature, might be part of God's plan. For instance, Eliot Page being born with female parts doesn't necessarily mean that He intended Mr Page to live as a woman; His plan might very well involve hormones and surgery.
I appreciate that perspective, as the conversation under the assumption we all have the same values but disagree on facts has been extremely frustrating. That said, do you mind elaborating? If bringing the mind in line with the body is so costly (in the sense that it's better to do the opposite), why is it ok to force the majority of the population to see trans women as women "in every way that matters outside the bedroom and doctor's office"? Also, why those particular exclusions, and how do you argue against people who think even those are also a sign of bigotry?
Not at all. I believe everyone is entitled to my opinion.
It's not about the majority's minds, per se, so much as their manners: what Tim Walz described as:
There are physical differences between the sexes; we can change some of them, but have yet to discover how to change others; measuring and sorting along these physical attributes can sometimes place trans individuals in the category opposite their identity. However, these physical attributes should not be relevant outside a narrow set of circumstances.
They are the most obvious instances where someone's genitals might matter.
WRT bedrooms, I again refer to Mr Walz' Golden Rule. If I am not, personally, dating someone, than the difference between their being attracted to/not attracted to 'people born with female/male/ambiguous parts', 'people identifying as women/men/non-binary', and 'people who look feminine/masculine/androgynous' is very low on the list of my concerns.
WRT the field of medicine, my recommendation is to Replace The Symbol With The Substance. If Alice:
&c., &c., list that on her medical chart. Asking if she is 'really' a man or a woman is, at that point, superfluous. (Cf. "A Human's Guide to Words", E. Yudkowsky, February 2008)
This assumes we are all on the same page about what constitutes good manners, and the boundaries of your own damn business. neither of those is the case, so you will necessarily be involved in changing their minds, possibly forcefully. This all would be fine, but given your portrayal of bringing the mind to be in line with the body as something to be avoided, I don't understand how you're so flippant about the minds of the majority of your countrymen.
That would be a decent (but still debateable) argument for abolishing sex segregation altogether, and sorting them by physical characteristics. It's not a good argument for keeping sex segregation but letting trans people into opposite-sex spaces modulo some physical characteristics. Why are you in favor of the latter rather than the former?
Right, but a certain type of trans activist would invoke it to tell you your partner's genitals is none of your damn business, and that (assuming you're straight) if you're not attracted to a woman just because she's trans, you should psy-op yourself into at least being open to it, the same way you want people to psy-op themselves into believing that trans women are women in every way that matters. I don't see how those arguments are fundamentally different.
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I will cut in here to ask how this conviction is compatible with the fact that transgender (biological) men resemble other men far more than they resemble women, and transgender (biological) women resemble other women far more than they resemble men.
The prototypical trans male is a system network administrator and Warhammer collector who grows their hair long and wants to be called Anna, and the prototypical trans female is a slight girl with anorexia who cuts her hair short and wants to be called Eliot. (I've met both in my time). Both display physical and mental traits that are strongly associated with their biological sex and strongly disassociated with the sex they proclaim themselves to be.
How do you draw a cluster that includes women-who-want-to-be-men and men but excludes women, and vice versa? What do they have in common? As far as I can see transgenderism correlates far more with autism and self-loathing than with resemblance to the opposite sex, and therefore fixing the self-loathing seems like the most kind and effective approach.
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The Nazis killed a bunch of their own in the Night of the Long Knives, so certainly right-wingers are at least capable of eating their own. You can argue that the nazis were left-wingers, I guess. "leftism" is such a nebulous concept. But one could also, with as much justification, argue that Stalin was a right-winger.
Leftism is literally satanic in one very specific meaning of "satanic", but early Christianity was leftist by the standards of its time, so it would be rather odd to claim that all of leftism is satanic in any meaningful sense.
To be honest I don't know enough about the Nazis to have an opinion there, but in human politics leftism generally means organizing the masses against the elites by appealing to 'equity', so it'd be hard to call the Soviets anything else.
Not at all. In this case the 'elite' in question is God and conforming to that hierarchy was absolute. Nor were early Christians particularly interested in overthrowing the (human) elites of their day.
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Fascist states have an even poorer track record than communist ones as far as longevity is concerned. Monarchies are stable in the Middle East for now, but their European counterparts were all overthrown or defanged centuries ago, being themselves the soil from which liberalism sprouted in the first place. Just as the printing press and mass literacy fatally weakened the Catholic order of medieval Europe, modern communication technologies pose a dire risk to would-be authoritarians of any ideological bent wherever they have taken root. The CCP has the best chance at riding this particular lion, and newer technolgies may turn the tide in their favor, but so far they are losing the hearts and minds of their younger generations, who are fleeing en masse to Thailand and the West.
Lutheranism took off and spread due to military backing during a moment of weakness in the HRE. It’s way too early for mass literacy, although I suppose the printing press played a role it wasn’t totally necessary- Lutheran-esque ideas had existed and even found local success before.
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My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
I think this is happening.
Consider the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell proposed a theory of history where, from time to time, the middle class overthrows the upper class with the help of the proletariat.
I think there are some similarities to the current situation. 2024 can be seen as a revolution of the middle class tech elite against the upper class deep state. Each side employs its own proletarian armies. The tech elite has rural whites. The deep state has urban blacks and Hispanics. But the lower class armies are largely orthogonal to the intra-elite struggle.
The current upper class traces its status back to WWII. They are now in their third and fourth generation. They are tired, corrupt, and not that bright.
I think the new challengers win for the simple reason that they are far more intelligent and qualified.
The "Middle" in Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism isn't the middle class - it is a potential counter-elite (like the Bolsheviks and their base in the organised working class and the army). Goldstein explicitly says that there is no Middle in Oceania because the regime has successfully prevented a Middle arising - my reading is that Orwell intended it to be obvious that the Outer Party are part of the Low who are fake-promoted in order to compromise them sufficiently to allow them to do particular kinds of dirty work for the regime (such as Winston Smith's day job falsifying history). To use the language of Ribbonfarm's Gervais Principle, the Outer Party in general and Winston Smith in particular (Julia slightly less so) are Clueless.
The tech right isn't the middle-class - it's a relatively small number of billionaires with massively powerful platforms. As Orwell/Goldstein points out, they are a counter-elite, a true Middle who threaten the High. And its story is consistent with one of the two ways of a Middle appearing that Orwell/Goldstein point out - a Middle can split off from the High if a faction of the elite become disgruntled, or from the Low if a newly important class is excluded from power. Musk and Andreesen were absolutely part of the elite in 2015 - we can argue about why they became disgruntled enough to join a movement throwing rocks at the system they had done so well out of, but they clearly did.
The link between Orwell's Middle and the middle class is that the social changes driven by the Industrial Revolution means that there are true Middles arising from the Low consistently from the 18th to the 20th centuries which the High need to co-opt to stay in power. This isn't just the classical merchant bourgeoisie - in many ways it is the class of educated technicians like artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte that is more dangerous (this is the group which right-populists call the PMC and which Richard Hanania calls elite human capital). Orwell writes about this class as a potential tool to overthrow both the traditional elite and the merchant bourgeoisie in the context of WW2 in The Lion and the Unicorn
Possible essay prompt for someone good at wrangling an LLM: "Compare and contrast how Napoleon Bonaparte and Elon Musk parlayed the ability to land a large rocket on a small target into supreme political power."
Yes, "counter-elite" is a better description than "middle class" in what I wrote.
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I would say it's the upper (propertied) class + the proletariat (workers) overthrowing the middle class and the underclass. Wokism is the religion of HR and managers and lawyers, not business owners or brick layers. But that may be a British understanding of class.
Business owners may be rich, but they are generally not "upper class".
Consider, for example, the person who owns a tire center that gives him an income of 1 million per year. He may be rich, but his class affiliation is middle or working class. On the other hand, a NY Times journalist may only make 100,000 a year but is likely to be upper class because of their inherited wealth and educational background.
Now, as always, the only way to be upper class is to be born into it. It is those people who run the DC blob. The tech elite, on the other hand, is largely self-made.
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Yeah, right wing regimes might be subverted, they might rot from the inside and stagnate for generations, they might be conquered, but ‘things get so suddenly worse everyone learns their lesson’ is mostly a far left thing. Humanity lived for thousands of years under right wing illiberalism; we have a deep and abiding instinct for it.
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