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Last night, I turned on NPR in the car and listened to some guy expound about how the last 20 years of Ukrainian history are entirely the West's fault as we supported neo-nazis and genocide in the Donbas. Depending on the political party in power, half the country and media ecosystem is in hysterics about FEMA death camps/alt-right neonazis/excessive taxation/insufficient taxation/so on and so forth.
This morning, I open up globaltimes.cn and read about how Actually, China's COVID response has been entirely rational, orderly and planned this way from the beginning by our hyper-competent, divinely ordained leadership.
Criticism is good, criticism and awareness of our failures is important to (try and) hold politicians accountable and identify problems to be solved. We've blown way past that to screaming from the rooftops and rending our clothes about Trump lowering the corporate tax rate/Obamacare/children in cages/whatever outrage you want to pick that we promptly forgot as the news cycle churned over. Nobody bothers to defend the West anymore; it's imperialistic, misogynistic, anti-white, anti-black, antipathic to the middle and lower classes, exploitative of labor, sclerotic, bureaucratic, autocratic, whatever you want it to be man. Someone's gotta pick up the standard - we may not be improving lives as much as we were a half-century ago, but as far as I can tell, nobody else is doing better and this is still the system to emulate for innovation and human progress.
To your other post:
Someday, I'm sure humanity will come up with something better. I'm not going to buy into the hubris of the End of History and claim that we've solved the problem guys, it's liberal democracies all the way down and all we need to care about is execution. But like I said, I don't see anything better in the marketplace of ideas at the moment.
I may have phrased my posts poorly, because funnily enough I think the first part of your comment addresses my second post better than the latter.
On messages being shouted from the rooftops:
I disagree. You'll know a message is shouted from the rooftops when you can get in trouble for disagreeing with it. If you get fired, blacklisted in an industry, debanked, or arrested, or if alphabet agencies have taskforces dedicated to scrubbing or throttling your disagreement from the internet. If you are looking at spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to put your daughter into a private religious school for a religion you don't believe in, in the hopes of turning down the volume of the message, it's probably being shouted from the rooftops. But the things you pointed at are just background noise.
On upholding liberal principles:
Yes, yes, I'm sure of that too, but that's not what I meant. The point is that when we do come up with something new, it will be, well, new. Something different from the current liberal system. It will fly or fall on it's own, and thus have no claim to the successes of liberalism, even if it does turn out to surpass it. Likewise people who are arguing for violating liberal principles now in order improve society, even as they call themselves liberals from the other side of their mouth, shouldn't get to claim the successes of liberalism. To be clear, I don't think you're doing it, though I may have been poking you to find out if you will.
By the way, has your worldview changed somewhat recently? I might be misremembering your comments from the old place, but I've been doing some double takes reading you lately. I seem to be getting the vibe of just a bit more sympathy for the dissidents? Not that you agree with us, just that we're not insane for complaining.
That's a classic. "We're not perfect, but over here you're free to criticize the government" has been the staple of American propaganda since at least the end of WWII. I'll grant you that we're a little bit more subtle about it than authoritarian states, but as the past few years are showing, it's not that our rulers are allowing criticism as a matter of principle, they're not even allowing it pragmatically on the off chance that us plebs might have a good point every once in a while, and it would be unwise to shut us up. It's a calculated play, it's better to let crazy doomsday preachers rant on street corners, and have people completely ignore them as they walk by on their way to work, than to make a show of silencing them. Of course the moment the crazy preacher gains a following and so much as influences an election in an unsanctioned direction, the knives come out, and the show is over.
That's another classic. The issue here is that when you start on top, and have a long way to fall, you might be able to use "nobody else is doing better" as an excuse for a very long time, even as things are getting obviously worse. Hell, if the whole world is becoming more authoritarian, you might be able to claim you're "liberal" even after installing a dictator, simply because the other dictators are worse.
I'd agree that institutional power has swung fairly far in one direction in the past decade and can sympathize, but 1) my point is much broader than the superficial culture war topics du jour and 2) there's plenty of places in this country where the messaging is very different.
Or, it may very well build on the successes of liberalism and improve on them in a linear fashion. People may, in your view, violate liberal principles in some instances while still adhering to them more broadly - does a liberal who supports a free press, open markets and some restrictions on hate speech get to lay claim to the benefits of the liberal tradition? How about a MAGA-conservative who's a hardline free speecher, adamant supporter of freedom of religion in every instance, but agitates for tariffs and protectionism?
Dogmatic adherence to liberal principles in every instance is both impossible and likely undesirable. I recognize this facilitates an easy slide into...well, many Bad Places, but regardless, at the end of the day, we're going to have to hash it out and work together to compromise rather than dusting off the sacred texts of liberalism to answer every question. Dogmatic pursuit of Free Trade may not be optimal when some other countries are mashing defect. Unlimited free speech may not be the way to go in burning theaters.
Can you be more specific what you mean by 'us plebs might have a good point every once in a while?' Does this mean you want us to elect plebs to congress, that you want your elites to be more responsive to what you want, that elites are by and large correct but now and then the plebs know better and should be listened to? Although in the latter case, I'd also ask how you expect us to know when the plebs have the right of it.
I don't believe that we're perfect, nor do I take excessive comfort in being better than the authoritarian states. In an America where everybody was extolling the virtues of our Glorious Leaders, I would be shouting from the rooftops about corruption and overseas military adventures. Instead, I believe we live in an America where nobody, ever can suggest that our government might have done something good without turning heads. I have enough humility to recognize that on 99% of the issues put before Congress, I'm truly ignorant, and maybe, just maybe, they might know something after all their briefings and committee meetings that I don't.
But it's a fine line to tread between trusting your reps, and turning a blind eye to corruption, eh?
It's less an argument about the current state of affairs in America being peachy, and more that I don't think I've seen a superior successor ideology rapidly outstripping us in terms of outcomes that I would consider endorsing over western-flavored liberal democracy.
I'd be lying (not to mention ashamed) to say that my views haven't changed over the last several years, but I believe my overall shtick has been the same. I've always had sympathy for conservatives angry at the system in the same way I've had sympathy for Blacks. I aim to balance arguing for what I believe in with further alienating left and right. I don't enjoy social media or writing long forum screeds and I lurked in various forums for twenty odd years before finally participating here out of a sense of civic duty (although I admit sometimes I make myself laugh), which undoubtedly is part of why many find me insufferable.
So no, I don't think and have never thought that you're insane. I think we have common ground in disapproving of small children hanging out with strippers and many other areas, and believe that we can have mutually respectful dialogue where we disagree.
It might be a sign of how bad things got, or of me going off the deep end, but I don't know if I even believe in these "directions" and things swinging in them anymore.
Just a heads up you might be talking to a certified loony, I guess.
So is mine! It might not be obvious because I think I'm something of a through-the-looking-glass version of yourself. If I understand you correctly, you seem to believe that all this culture war is a distraction from all the important stuff like tax policy, healthcare, foreign policy, some aspects of education, etc. - things that determine how a country is actually run. I say, to hell with all that! If it's that important to you, you can have it! I want the cultural madness to stop, and by that I'm not talking about topics du jour and fights between the woke and the unwoke, these are just aesthetics. One day we'll talk about the importance of deconstructing whiteness in math, and how important it is to promote other ways of knowing, another day we'll be strapping electrodes to your brain because that's what The Science says. With all the talk of AI, I'm half expecting the latter aesthetic to make a comeback, what a glorious show that would be! All the true believer wokies suddenly getting the TERF treatment and finding themselves on the margins of society, and half of the dissidents suddenly deciding that maybe the regime isn't so bad after all, now that it's whispering sweet nothings into their ears.
I don't know if I have a way to distill what I'm frantically gesturing at into a single principle, but if I had to, I'd call it something like preventing the 1984-ification and drowification of our society. Rat-racing, backstabbing, and maybe even memory-holing have always existed to some extent, but it got way out of hand in the past decade.
Well then, we're right back to the End of History, aren't we? It's just Liberalism with a tweak or two.
Sure. I recognize that anything outside the world of pure mathematics will have fuzzy borders, and will bring you a world of pain in categorizing it, if you want to be too strict and literal. But this is where we come back to the point of promises being made. If you openly promise free press, open markets and some restriction on hate speech, and people support that, that's well and good. If after that a newspaper publishes an article you don't like, and you start dicking around with their ability to reach an audience, you don't get to use the fuzziness of the concept to pretend you're still upholding your promise.
It's mostly the latter, but I'm approaching it a bit differently. Electing the plebs, and having the elites be more responsive falls into the "principled support for free speech". That's how our democracy is supposed to work ideally - we can elect someone from among ourselves, and put pressure on the government to carry out the will of the people, to that end we need free speech so we can organize, tell the rulers what we want, etc.
"Us plebs might have a good point every once in a while", is a more cynical take, where the will of the people doesn't really enter the picture. The elites do mostly what they want, not what the people who they represent want. Even then there's a pragmatic case for keeping free speech, as a sort of 4-chanesque idea generator. You'll mostly get garbage, but every once in a while it'll spit out a mathematical proof for a previously unsolved problem, the coordinates of an ISIS training camp, or figure out there's something fishy going on in Wuhan, when all the epidemiologists are swearing everything is fine. Now how you tell the good bits from the garbage is another story, but that's not the point. The point is that they let the free speech machine run and churn out content, and the ideas are there for the elites to take or leave.
My point is that even this cynical version of our democracy, where the plebs' ability to steer the government is mostly a sham, is not what we're doing anymore. According to our elites the free speech machine is dangerous, and has to be shackled like ChatGPT to only spit out goodthink.
You're right that America doesn't openly get a lot of praise, but there's a bizarre dynamic about it. All the right-thinking Euros agree "America bad", but anyone suggesting that we don't have to copy-paste all their crazy ideas to Europe will be met with massive amount of derision.
Also beyond America there's the "international liberal rules-based order" all the important people seem to agree exists, and deserves open praise.
Sure, I don't even want to change anyone's ideology (again, I sort of think they're mostly aesthetics). I just want an acknowledgement that there are promises that are not being kept, and that something should be done about it. It doesn't even have to be solved now, or anytime soon. I'll settle for "You have a point, we might need to get around to that some day", and "don't worry, I won't call you a Nazi".
MIT just published a free speech manifesto that would have gotten people crucified a few years ago. The FBI is claiming that demand for white supremacy outstrips supply. I don't think the pendulum is going to swing back to some evangelical Christian theocracy, but I think the worst ideas of the last decade will be curbed and the pressure will relax. Trump 2024 being the wild card...
I'm not sure I'd be so dismissive as to call it a distraction, but I see the culture war as a block (or more cynically, a lever) used to pit us against each other. I believe there are clear, positive-sum, winning policies we could adopt on many of those issues if we could react to proposals from the other side with something less than rabid, all-consuming hatred and default opposition. And failing that, at least work out compromises.
What do you think needs to happen to promote cooperation rather than backstabbing/defecting on society?
Maybe, maybe not. We have the means at hand for much more participation in the political process than the Founders did; virtually every citizen carries around a device that could instantaneously be used to vote in referenda. Our citizens are more literate, more educated and more knowledgeable than they've ever been in history. Or, despite this, you may want to restrict participation in specific referenda to citizens sufficiently knowledgeable about a specific subject matter...but then the issue becomes preventing people from gaming the system (i.e. if you're a neo-Republican/Democrat, here are the answers to the quiz they will ask you before you can vote, recruiting people to a cause, activists trying to insert questions primed to only let the right type of person vote, etc). The system described in Too Like the Lightning has always struck me as interesting as well - a small number of nation-states unbound by geographical location that you opt-into, forcing them to compete aesthetically and materially for members.
The development of ever-more-impressive models makes me wonder if at some point, a centrally planned economy run by an oracular AI would start to be able to outperform the free market.
Would these just be minor tweaks to Liberalism, or a sea change in society? I can see any of these being transformative and potentially outperforming groups that stick with the old formula.
Fair enough. I assume you're referring to something like google deprioritizing conservative media in search functions rather than some media organization encouraging true believers to slaughter the infidels.
I think there's a number of distinctions to be made here. There's a beneficent paternalism, where the plebs want something really fucking stupid or two clearly contradictory things, and the elites ignore it to take (what they think is) the better option. There's a parasitic antisocial option, where the elites actively pass legislation that will help them extract wealth and resources from the plebs, ossify their own power, or just harm the populace because sadism. And you could imagine a situation where we elect representatives, and they simply vote directly as their constituents would want based on how popular any given issue is in their state (but then why have representatives in the first place?).
I assume all of these are simultaneously happening, although I also expect that #2 is significantly less common than people seem to think - I just don't believe conflict theory is widespread in American politics, particularly at the higher levels of government.
I largely agree with the rest of your points. Where I mostly disagree with you is seeing intentionality or conspiracies on the left formed with the aim of punishing you or yours. I can sometimes see how it could come across that way to you (rhetoric from the LGBT community about coming for your kids, etc etc), but other times I've been closer to ground zero and have largely only met people with good intentions. Whether that generalizes to other fields or I'm just being naive.../shrug.
I've been following these sort of news, and hoping one of them might herald some sort of turning of the tide for years. At this point the most I can say is I'll believe when I see it. The only topic where I could see a real rollback happening is trans issues, but even that is far from decided.
And even if you're right, this sort of sours the whole thing. If one side doesn't get their way in an election means we're right back to firing people for cracking their knuckles, using the mainstream media to sic half the nation on a teenager that smiled the wrong way, and burning cities, then are we compromising and cooperating, or am I being terrorized?
There's a certain "draw the rest of the fucking owl" quality to it where it seems at once obvious and unattainable, but what I think we need is politics-free spaces. They used to be pretty common: sports, music, film, games, crafts, hiking, bird watching... anything that lets us see the common humanity in each other, and forget about our differences. I regret to inform you it's an open front of the culture war.This is why I think the culture war issues that at first glance might appear the most trivial, are some of the most serious. Drama in a knitting community might seem absurd in it's pettiness at first glance, but if it happens, that's one less place where people can tune out the culture war, and focus on something constructive. And if it keeps happening often enough, some people might start feeling that even the drama-free places come with an asterisk that says "so far".
Call me conspiratorial, but I don't think these fronts were opened by accident either.
Basically-anarcho-capitalism, and literally-a-star-trek-episode? I'll file those under revolutionary, and sinking or swimming on their own merit, rather than an extension of liberalism.
It could be either, it all depends on the scale, and the "mainstreamability". When it's some some open source projects like Mastadon banning "chuds" from their federated network, I can shrug and say "fine, let them have their little circle jerk". When it's Twitter or Google I take it a lot more seriously. Similarly when it's some edgy fedposter calling for slaughtering the infidels, I just assume someone had a bad day. When it's Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, that's a lot more scary.
Are the elites better at not wanting stupid or contradictory things? Shutting down nuclear power to fight global warming? Trying to bring democracy to places still running on tribalism? Welcoming hundreds of thousands of refugees with a very different culture, and assuming the differences will just automatically work themselves out? Mandating that you wear a mask as you enter a restaurant, even as you're free to sit there maskless for hours as your munch away on your meal?
The difference is my stupid ideas are confined to the threads of this website, and conversations with my wife. Their stupid ideas are actually implemented.
I'm well aware, I come from a lefty background myself. I used to have quite a few friends who started leaning heavily into social justice some years ago, and I take a peak into lefty spaces every once in a while as well. For the most part I haven't detected any "bad intentions" either. The thing is, I could write a whole book about why that does not matter, and is arguably worse.
For one you don't need everyone, not even anything close to a majority, to be in on the conspiracy for it to work. The Rotheram police wasn't into sexually abusing kids, but they were still actively enabling it because of how our society is set up. This is how this conspiracies on the left* tend to work, in my opinion, a handful of sociopaths leading people with good intentions. Which leads us to another point, that someone who did have so many good intentions, and instead was just looking to benefit themselves for example, might at some point be stopped by some sense of "maybe it's not worth it". But tell someone they're actually doing good by fucking someone else over? The sky is the limit!
*) I want to make it clear that I don't believe there is anything specific to the left in these things. It's just a historical accident that they're a go-to example nowadays, and like I said I half-expect some switch being flipped in the mid-term future, and nerdy rationalists becoming the sociopaths.
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