This reads as a little applause-lighty for my taste, to be honest. It’s really easy to claim that the arbiters of social policy are blind to actual suffering, and not much harder to spin that into an appeal for your particular ideology, which by virtue of its construction or unusual purity or definition of “actual suffering” of course doesn’t have these problems.
If a quote on policy would be equally at home heading a libertarian or a socialist or an anarcho-primitivist blog, does it really constrain our anticipations about policy to any meaningful extent?
If a quote on policy would be equally at home heading a libertarian or a socialist or an anarcho-primitivist blog, does it really constrain our anticipations about policy to any meaningful extent?
I read it as cautioning us to resist the temptation to unquestioningly accept nice sounding policy as good policy.
Also any quotes that couldn’t be read as potentially applicable by a large swath of the political spectrum might trigger blue-green tribalism feelings and kind of defeat the spirit of the no mind killer rule.
The point isn’t to constrain our anticipations about policy; it’s to constrain our anticipations about policy-makers. To get actual policy anticipation-control, you need to apply it in a specific context where you know more about the sort of policy the people in question would favour if they (openly) didn’t care about actual suffering.
This reads as a little applause-lighty for my taste, to be honest. It’s really easy to claim that the arbiters of social policy are blind to actual suffering, and not much harder to spin that into an appeal for your particular ideology, which by virtue of its construction or unusual purity or definition of “actual suffering” of course doesn’t have these problems.
If a quote on policy would be equally at home heading a libertarian or a socialist or an anarcho-primitivist blog, does it really constrain our anticipations about policy to any meaningful extent?
I read it as cautioning us to resist the temptation to unquestioningly accept nice sounding policy as good policy.
Also any quotes that couldn’t be read as potentially applicable by a large swath of the political spectrum might trigger blue-green tribalism feelings and kind of defeat the spirit of the no mind killer rule.
The point isn’t to constrain our anticipations about policy; it’s to constrain our anticipations about policy-makers. To get actual policy anticipation-control, you need to apply it in a specific context where you know more about the sort of policy the people in question would favour if they (openly) didn’t care about actual suffering.