The things I previously mentioned such as “Or that there is >50% probability that Brexit will literally lead to a neo nazi state in the UK within 10 years?” are mostly positions expressed by freinds. The group this person joined was advocating violent communist revolution and the murder of enemies of the people (as in it was an explicitly communist group, not a anti-Trump group that had been hijacked by communists), and so cannot be seen as a reaction to Trump or Brexit.
But, in the more general case, there are a lot of people, a lot of centeralists, who are opposed to Trump/Brexit. So people do not need to join forces with extremists to fight them.
(It’s not as if the rhetoric of the less-pleasant parts of the political right is any nicer or more sensible than that of the less-pleasant parts of the political left. Intelligent educated friendly right-leaning folk can find themselves with some regrettable—dare I say deplorable? -- bedfellows too.)
I agree with that, but I think that there is a difference in behaviour due to the fact that the left has been winning in all areas with the possible exception of economics for the last 50 years or more, but suddenly there have been some unexpected rightist victories. Firstly, this means that the left expects to be pushing back the right, and there is a general assumption that, for instance, rightists must disavow and sever all ties with white nationalists but the left can freely associate with extremists.
Secondly, given that the right has suddenly managed to win some victories, might the previous constant leftward march of history change, at least in some areas? In the same way that feminism and gay rights has made constant progress for the last 50 years, might nationalism make constant progress for the next 50 years?
I don’t know how much of the left are considering that as a possibility, but I can understand that they might be terrified and lashing out while they still have the ability to.
So yes, the right are not more sensible or nicer in general, its just that right now the left have a greater ability to justify violence. If that changes, then we might live in interesting times.
Does it make a difference if instead of talking about “left” and “right” we focus on specific agendas?
For example, if “left” includes both “gay rights” and “killing the kulaks”, then it may sound scary for a left-leaning person to say “we had 50 years of the left progress, but now we will have 50 years of the right progress”, but less scary if you translate it to e.g. “we have 50 years of gay rights, but kulaks are not going to be killed at least during the next 50 years”.
Yeah, this is too optimistic; I am just saying that perhaps focusing on the details may change the perspective. Maybe the historically most important outcome of the “50 years of right progress” will be e.g. banning the child genital mutilation, honor killings, and similar issues which the current left is not going to touch with a ten-foot pole (because they would involve criticizing cultural habits of other cultures, which is a taboo for the left, but the right would enjoy doing this).
I guess my point is that imagining the “right” only clicking the Undo button during the following 50 years is unnecessarily narrowing their scope of possible action. (Just like the “left” also had other things to do, besides killing the kulaks.)
I think people cluster into left and right because those are the tribes. However, it can be oversimplistic and I agree that there are many potential directions left and right progress can take—indeed, if a few more Islamic terrorists shoot up gay bars there could be a lot of LBGTs defecting to right-nationalism.
I think people cluster into left and right because those are the tribes.
Some people join the tribes because they are connected with the causes they support, but I think most people are there simply because of the other people who are there. When all your friends are X, there is a strong pressure on you to become X, too. And when people who enjoy hurting you are X, you are likely to become Y, if Y seems like the only force able to oppose X. It’s like having a monkey tribe split into two subgroups; of course it makes sense to join the subgroup with your friends rather than the subgroup with your enemies. And the next step is making up the story why all good people are in your team, and all bad people are in the other team—this signals that you have no significant conflicts in your team, and no significant friends in the other team, so you are a loyal member.
But then also words have consequences, so if your team’s banner says e.g. that you should burn the witches, then sooner or later some witches are likely to get burned. Even if most people in the team are actually not happy about burning the witches, and joined merely because their friends are there. Sometimes people agree that those words about “burning witches” were meant metaphorically, not literally; but there is a certain fragility about that, because someone is likely to decide that literally burning a witch will make even stronger signal of their loyalty to the tribe.
if a few more Islamic terrorists shoot up gay bars there could be a lot of LBGTs defecting to right-nationalism
It makes me sad that the popular political positions seem to be either nationalism or cultural relativism. Is there these days even a significant pro-”Western civilization” side? I mean a side that would say that as long as you follow the rules of civilized life, your language and color of skin don’t matter, but if you as much as publicly talk positively about genital mutilation or “honor” killing, no one is going to give a fuck about your cultural or religious sensitivity, you are going to be called evil.
Well, if this person is joining an explicitly and specifically violent communist group, then I guess that indicates that this particular person is sympathetic with violent communism. That’s too bad, but it’s also pretty unusual and I’d classify it as “this person is broken” rather than “politics is broken” unless what you’re seeing is lots of otherwise sensible people joining explicitly violent explicitly communist groups. In that case, either we’ve got a general resurgence of violent communism (which would be alarming) or there’s something unusual about your friends (which would be interesting but not necessarily alarming).
I think you’re right that the last several decades have been pretty good for progressive social causes, and that this seems like it might be changing, and that this might lead to more violence from leftists. My guess is that serious politically-motivated violence will remain rare enough that you don’t actually need to worry about it unless for some reason you’re a specific target, and ineffectual enough that you don’t need to worry that it will have much impact beyond the violence itself.
What’s there been historically? Occasional riots (usually left) and demonstrations-turned-violent (usually left, though arguably when there’s been violence it’s been as much due to provocation from the police as to actual violent intent by the protestors). Occasional acts of terrorism (usually right, but occasionally kinda-left as with Kaczynski). All these things are really rare, which is why they make the news, which is why it’s easy to get worried about them :-). And they very rarely have any actual influence on what anyone else does.
The single most worrying political-violence-related outcome (to me) is that someone commits some act of violence and the administration uses that as a pretext for major gutting of civil liberties or something of the kind. The historical precedent I’d rather not be using explicitly is of course the Reichstag fire. [EDITED to add:] I mean specifically in the US; elsewhere in the allegedly civilized world I don’t think that sort of thing is so likely.
My guess is that serious politically-motivated violence will remain rare enough that you don’t actually need to worry about it
That’s the hope, right? We are living in a civilized society, etc. etc. There is not going to be a repeat of The Troubles, will there? No empire will collapse with a big bang, no mobs will torch the neighbourhoods, no lists of undesireables will be circulated…
What’s there been historically?
Historically? During the XX century? Being on the wrong side you stood a good chance of being killed. Sent to a gulag or a concentration camp, maybe.
I think communist beliefs, violent or not, are on the rise largely due to young angry people being too young to remember the cold war. Some friends and acquaintances from multiple disconnected freindship groups are communists, and too many of these advocate violence, although I think that they are still a tiny minority overall. I think the situation is, as you put it, “this person is broken”.
I’m not at all worried about actually being the victim of politically-motivated physical violence or of riots/revolutions etc in the near future. What worries me is general political polarisation leading to a situation where blue and red tribes hate each other and cannot interact, where politics is reduced to seeing who can shout ‘racist’ or ‘cuck’ loudest. My political beliefs have become increasingly right-wing, in a classically liberal sense as opposed to fascist, and it alienates me when friends advocate burning someone’s house down because they hold beliefs which are actually similar, perhaps even left of, mine. I’m not worried about them actually burning my house down, it’s just alienating on principle, and for fear of social exclusion.
WRT historical periods of political instability, I agree that such periods are infrequent, and given that we have seen the results of both Nazism and communism, I think it unlikely that those ideologies will gain power. But OTOH we are going to see certain events that are totally unprecedented in history, largely because of technology. We are already seeing levels of migration that I think exceeds anything in the past (due to better transport), which is leading to a rise in nationalism, and soon it is possible that we will see far more disruptive technologies such as human genetic engineering, large numbers of jobs being automated away, mass automated surveillance, and finally FAI. If safely navigating the problems these technologies pose requires a partially political solution, then we need sane politics. And yet political discourse has sunk to the point where political candidates are debating the size of their ‘hands’ and whether frogs are racist. Obama’s advisor seemed to think that the danger of AGI is that it might be programmed by white male autists.
We do not have the level of political sanity necessary to deal with disruptive technologies and its getting worse. Nick Bostrom thinks that genetically engineered IQ boosts of 100 points+ in a single generation might be possible, and soon. Nazism and communism are unlikely now, but how would society react to human genetically engineering? Many would try to ban it. Some would try to tax it. Countries where it was illegal might suffer massively reduced economic growth compared to those where it was allowed. Inequality might skyrocket. I’m not trying to suggest that we will specifically end up with ‘Gattaca’ or ‘Deux Ex: Mankind divided’ or any of the other specific science fiction explorations of these possibilities, I’m saying that I don’t know what will happen and political extremism/violence is certainly a possibility and it doesn’t help if extremism is increasing anyway!
My political beliefs have become increasingly right-wing, in a classically liberal sense as opposed to fascist, and it alienates me when friends advocate burning someone’s house down because they hold beliefs which are actually similar, perhaps even left of, mine.
The impression I have—though of course I don’t know what your friends have been saying—is that the burn-their-houses-down brigade are much more upset about the kinda-fascist sort of right than the kinda-libertarian sort of right. Of course even if I’m right about that that doesn’t necessarily reduce the sense of alienation; your aliefs needn’t match your beliefs.
We do not have the level of political sanity necessary to deal with disruptive technologies and it’s getting worse.
Agree about first half; not fully convinced about second half. As you pointed out yourself, it’s not that long ago that we had actual Nazis and Stalinists in power in Europe, and bad though early-21st-century politics is it doesn’t seem like it’s got there just yet. People have said horrible things about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but ten years ago they were saying similarly horrible things about George W Bush and, er, Hillary Clinton. But yeah, I can’t see our existing political institutions coping very well with immortality or super-effective genetic engineering or superintelligent AI, should those happen to come along.
The impression I have—though of course I don’t know what your friends have been saying—is that the burn-their-houses-down brigade are much more upset about the kinda-fascist sort of right than the kinda-libertarian sort of right. Of course even if I’m right about that that doesn’t necessarily reduce the sense of alienation; your aliefs needn’t match your beliefs.
Except that I don’t think libertarian is incompatible with boarder controls—indeed, libertarians are generally enthusiastic about property rights, and controlling immigration is no different to locking your front door and vetting potential housemates.
I’m not saying that the boarder controls should be based around skin colour, but the definition of ‘Nazi’ seems to have expanded to anyone who believes in any form of boarder control.
Agree about first half; not fully convinced about second half. As you pointed out yourself, it’s not that long ago that we had actual Nazis and Stalinists in power in Europe, and bad though early-21st-century politics is it doesn’t seem like it’s got there just yet.
I certainly agree that globally its not as bad as 1930-1990. Nevertheless, things seem to have got dramatically worse in the last decade—in my personal experience it used to be that people could agree to disagree, now most political opinions seem to be in lockstep, almost like a cult. More generally, I remember people criticising Bush, but now there are very intelligent people, even the head of CFAR, saying that Trump could be the end of democracy. Either they are correct, in which case that is obviously a cause for concern, or they are wrong and a lot of very smart people, inc rationalists, are utterly mindkilled.
the definition of ‘Nazi’ seems to have expanded to anyone who believes in any form of border control.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen the word used that way. But—the standard disclaimer—my left-leaning Facebook friends are not your left-leaning Facebook friends, unless there’s some purely coincidental overlap, and yours may be more Nazi-accusation-happier than mine.
Either they are correct, in which case that is obviously a cause for concern, or they are wrong and a lot of very smart people [...] are utterly mindkilled.
Or both, of course :-). More seriously, I think your observations are adequately explained by the hypothesis that (1) Trump and his administration are much more unusual than Bush and his administration, (2) they are in fact distinctly more likely than Bush was (though still not very likely) to do serious damage to the US’s democratic institutions, and (3) a lot of very smart people are somewhat mindkilled. I think #1 is obviously true, #2 is probably true, and #3 would be entirely unsurprising (much less surprising than all those people being utterly mindkilled).
Incidentally, I do remember some not-otherwise-obviously-crazy people speculating that Bush would simply refuse to leave office after 8 years and that somehow the Republican-controlled Congress would help make it so. So end-of-democracy hysteria isn’t so very new.
Er, FDR was elected for a third term before there were term limits for US presidents. The (stupid and not widespread) speculation was that GWB would cling to power by some means less legitimate than that.
I remember people criticising Bush, but now there are very intelligent people, even the head of CFAR, saying that Trump could be the end of democracy.
Trump is the end of democracy-as-we-know-it, and both sides of the political spectrum agree that this is the case, albeit for very different reasons. But the United States were never founded as a democracy in the first place; they’re supposed to be a federated republic, with plenty of checks-and-balances as an integral part of the overall arrangement. If our Constitution is worth more than the paper it’s printed on, we’ll find ourselves right back in what used to be the status quo.
but I can understand that they might be terrified and lashing out while they still have the ability to.
Terrified. What exactly are they terrified of? That their favourite political positions are not going to be held by people in power? In the West that’s hardly grounds for terror.
The things I previously mentioned such as “Or that there is >50% probability that Brexit will literally lead to a neo nazi state in the UK within 10 years?” are mostly positions expressed by freinds. The group this person joined was advocating violent communist revolution and the murder of enemies of the people (as in it was an explicitly communist group, not a anti-Trump group that had been hijacked by communists), and so cannot be seen as a reaction to Trump or Brexit.
But, in the more general case, there are a lot of people, a lot of centeralists, who are opposed to Trump/Brexit. So people do not need to join forces with extremists to fight them.
I agree with that, but I think that there is a difference in behaviour due to the fact that the left has been winning in all areas with the possible exception of economics for the last 50 years or more, but suddenly there have been some unexpected rightist victories. Firstly, this means that the left expects to be pushing back the right, and there is a general assumption that, for instance, rightists must disavow and sever all ties with white nationalists but the left can freely associate with extremists.
Secondly, given that the right has suddenly managed to win some victories, might the previous constant leftward march of history change, at least in some areas? In the same way that feminism and gay rights has made constant progress for the last 50 years, might nationalism make constant progress for the next 50 years?
I don’t know how much of the left are considering that as a possibility, but I can understand that they might be terrified and lashing out while they still have the ability to.
So yes, the right are not more sensible or nicer in general, its just that right now the left have a greater ability to justify violence. If that changes, then we might live in interesting times.
Does it make a difference if instead of talking about “left” and “right” we focus on specific agendas?
For example, if “left” includes both “gay rights” and “killing the kulaks”, then it may sound scary for a left-leaning person to say “we had 50 years of the left progress, but now we will have 50 years of the right progress”, but less scary if you translate it to e.g. “we have 50 years of gay rights, but kulaks are not going to be killed at least during the next 50 years”.
Yeah, this is too optimistic; I am just saying that perhaps focusing on the details may change the perspective. Maybe the historically most important outcome of the “50 years of right progress” will be e.g. banning the child genital mutilation, honor killings, and similar issues which the current left is not going to touch with a ten-foot pole (because they would involve criticizing cultural habits of other cultures, which is a taboo for the left, but the right would enjoy doing this).
I guess my point is that imagining the “right” only clicking the Undo button during the following 50 years is unnecessarily narrowing their scope of possible action. (Just like the “left” also had other things to do, besides killing the kulaks.)
I think people cluster into left and right because those are the tribes. However, it can be oversimplistic and I agree that there are many potential directions left and right progress can take—indeed, if a few more Islamic terrorists shoot up gay bars there could be a lot of LBGTs defecting to right-nationalism.
Some people join the tribes because they are connected with the causes they support, but I think most people are there simply because of the other people who are there. When all your friends are X, there is a strong pressure on you to become X, too. And when people who enjoy hurting you are X, you are likely to become Y, if Y seems like the only force able to oppose X. It’s like having a monkey tribe split into two subgroups; of course it makes sense to join the subgroup with your friends rather than the subgroup with your enemies. And the next step is making up the story why all good people are in your team, and all bad people are in the other team—this signals that you have no significant conflicts in your team, and no significant friends in the other team, so you are a loyal member.
But then also words have consequences, so if your team’s banner says e.g. that you should burn the witches, then sooner or later some witches are likely to get burned. Even if most people in the team are actually not happy about burning the witches, and joined merely because their friends are there. Sometimes people agree that those words about “burning witches” were meant metaphorically, not literally; but there is a certain fragility about that, because someone is likely to decide that literally burning a witch will make even stronger signal of their loyalty to the tribe.
It makes me sad that the popular political positions seem to be either nationalism or cultural relativism. Is there these days even a significant pro-”Western civilization” side? I mean a side that would say that as long as you follow the rules of civilized life, your language and color of skin don’t matter, but if you as much as publicly talk positively about genital mutilation or “honor” killing, no one is going to give a fuck about your cultural or religious sensitivity, you are going to be called evil.
Well, if this person is joining an explicitly and specifically violent communist group, then I guess that indicates that this particular person is sympathetic with violent communism. That’s too bad, but it’s also pretty unusual and I’d classify it as “this person is broken” rather than “politics is broken” unless what you’re seeing is lots of otherwise sensible people joining explicitly violent explicitly communist groups. In that case, either we’ve got a general resurgence of violent communism (which would be alarming) or there’s something unusual about your friends (which would be interesting but not necessarily alarming).
I think you’re right that the last several decades have been pretty good for progressive social causes, and that this seems like it might be changing, and that this might lead to more violence from leftists. My guess is that serious politically-motivated violence will remain rare enough that you don’t actually need to worry about it unless for some reason you’re a specific target, and ineffectual enough that you don’t need to worry that it will have much impact beyond the violence itself.
What’s there been historically? Occasional riots (usually left) and demonstrations-turned-violent (usually left, though arguably when there’s been violence it’s been as much due to provocation from the police as to actual violent intent by the protestors). Occasional acts of terrorism (usually right, but occasionally kinda-left as with Kaczynski). All these things are really rare, which is why they make the news, which is why it’s easy to get worried about them :-). And they very rarely have any actual influence on what anyone else does.
The single most worrying political-violence-related outcome (to me) is that someone commits some act of violence and the administration uses that as a pretext for major gutting of civil liberties or something of the kind. The historical precedent I’d rather not be using explicitly is of course the Reichstag fire. [EDITED to add:] I mean specifically in the US; elsewhere in the allegedly civilized world I don’t think that sort of thing is so likely.
That’s the hope, right? We are living in a civilized society, etc. etc. There is not going to be a repeat of The Troubles, will there? No empire will collapse with a big bang, no mobs will torch the neighbourhoods, no lists of undesireables will be circulated…
Historically? During the XX century? Being on the wrong side you stood a good chance of being killed. Sent to a gulag or a concentration camp, maybe.
It is something I hope, and also something I guess is probably true. Of course I could turn out to be wrong.
Oh, for sure. But that’s an entirely different failure mode from the ones skeptical_lurker appears to be concerned with.
I think communist beliefs, violent or not, are on the rise largely due to young angry people being too young to remember the cold war. Some friends and acquaintances from multiple disconnected freindship groups are communists, and too many of these advocate violence, although I think that they are still a tiny minority overall. I think the situation is, as you put it, “this person is broken”.
I’m not at all worried about actually being the victim of politically-motivated physical violence or of riots/revolutions etc in the near future. What worries me is general political polarisation leading to a situation where blue and red tribes hate each other and cannot interact, where politics is reduced to seeing who can shout ‘racist’ or ‘cuck’ loudest. My political beliefs have become increasingly right-wing, in a classically liberal sense as opposed to fascist, and it alienates me when friends advocate burning someone’s house down because they hold beliefs which are actually similar, perhaps even left of, mine. I’m not worried about them actually burning my house down, it’s just alienating on principle, and for fear of social exclusion.
WRT historical periods of political instability, I agree that such periods are infrequent, and given that we have seen the results of both Nazism and communism, I think it unlikely that those ideologies will gain power. But OTOH we are going to see certain events that are totally unprecedented in history, largely because of technology. We are already seeing levels of migration that I think exceeds anything in the past (due to better transport), which is leading to a rise in nationalism, and soon it is possible that we will see far more disruptive technologies such as human genetic engineering, large numbers of jobs being automated away, mass automated surveillance, and finally FAI. If safely navigating the problems these technologies pose requires a partially political solution, then we need sane politics. And yet political discourse has sunk to the point where political candidates are debating the size of their ‘hands’ and whether frogs are racist. Obama’s advisor seemed to think that the danger of AGI is that it might be programmed by white male autists.
We do not have the level of political sanity necessary to deal with disruptive technologies and its getting worse. Nick Bostrom thinks that genetically engineered IQ boosts of 100 points+ in a single generation might be possible, and soon. Nazism and communism are unlikely now, but how would society react to human genetically engineering? Many would try to ban it. Some would try to tax it. Countries where it was illegal might suffer massively reduced economic growth compared to those where it was allowed. Inequality might skyrocket. I’m not trying to suggest that we will specifically end up with ‘Gattaca’ or ‘Deux Ex: Mankind divided’ or any of the other specific science fiction explorations of these possibilities, I’m saying that I don’t know what will happen and political extremism/violence is certainly a possibility and it doesn’t help if extremism is increasing anyway!
We never had and yet we all are here.
Dat anthropic bias tho!
Good point.
The impression I have—though of course I don’t know what your friends have been saying—is that the burn-their-houses-down brigade are much more upset about the kinda-fascist sort of right than the kinda-libertarian sort of right. Of course even if I’m right about that that doesn’t necessarily reduce the sense of alienation; your aliefs needn’t match your beliefs.
Agree about first half; not fully convinced about second half. As you pointed out yourself, it’s not that long ago that we had actual Nazis and Stalinists in power in Europe, and bad though early-21st-century politics is it doesn’t seem like it’s got there just yet. People have said horrible things about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but ten years ago they were saying similarly horrible things about George W Bush and, er, Hillary Clinton. But yeah, I can’t see our existing political institutions coping very well with immortality or super-effective genetic engineering or superintelligent AI, should those happen to come along.
Except that I don’t think libertarian is incompatible with boarder controls—indeed, libertarians are generally enthusiastic about property rights, and controlling immigration is no different to locking your front door and vetting potential housemates.
I’m not saying that the boarder controls should be based around skin colour, but the definition of ‘Nazi’ seems to have expanded to anyone who believes in any form of boarder control.
I certainly agree that globally its not as bad as 1930-1990. Nevertheless, things seem to have got dramatically worse in the last decade—in my personal experience it used to be that people could agree to disagree, now most political opinions seem to be in lockstep, almost like a cult. More generally, I remember people criticising Bush, but now there are very intelligent people, even the head of CFAR, saying that Trump could be the end of democracy. Either they are correct, in which case that is obviously a cause for concern, or they are wrong and a lot of very smart people, inc rationalists, are utterly mindkilled.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen the word used that way. But—the standard disclaimer—my left-leaning Facebook friends are not your left-leaning Facebook friends, unless there’s some purely coincidental overlap, and yours may be more Nazi-accusation-happier than mine.
Or both, of course :-). More seriously, I think your observations are adequately explained by the hypothesis that (1) Trump and his administration are much more unusual than Bush and his administration, (2) they are in fact distinctly more likely than Bush was (though still not very likely) to do serious damage to the US’s democratic institutions, and (3) a lot of very smart people are somewhat mindkilled. I think #1 is obviously true, #2 is probably true, and #3 would be entirely unsurprising (much less surprising than all those people being utterly mindkilled).
Incidentally, I do remember some not-otherwise-obviously-crazy people speculating that Bush would simply refuse to leave office after 8 years and that somehow the Republican-controlled Congress would help make it so. So end-of-democracy hysteria isn’t so very new.
You mean like FDR actually did? Except that he wasn’t a Republican.
Er, FDR was elected for a third term before there were term limits for US presidents. The (stupid and not widespread) speculation was that GWB would cling to power by some means less legitimate than that.
Putin’s a mindkiller.
Trump is the end of democracy-as-we-know-it, and both sides of the political spectrum agree that this is the case, albeit for very different reasons. But the United States were never founded as a democracy in the first place; they’re supposed to be a federated republic, with plenty of checks-and-balances as an integral part of the overall arrangement. If our Constitution is worth more than the paper it’s printed on, we’ll find ourselves right back in what used to be the status quo.
You should find better friends.
Terrified. What exactly are they terrified of? That their favourite political positions are not going to be held by people in power? In the West that’s hardly grounds for terror.