Would anyone care to dispute the object-level claim I made, or are people just spree-downvoting?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_determinism
Wikipedia seems to be pretty unambiguious about Marx being the first notable theorist here. It’s not about “neutrality”, there just isn’t any evidence that this claim is mistaken.
name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe… that’d be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and “interpreting” Luther’s theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say… you do realize that the vast majority of serious leftists—including American leftists, and I mean people who self-identify as socialists, left-libertarians, anarchists, etc—have nothing but scorn and contempt towards the NYT? In the left-wing interpretation of the “Cathederal”, the NYT is not an active weapon of the Big Bad System like in yours, but it is nonetheless viewed as a symbol of moral bankrupcy, insidious propaganda and serving as the mouthpiece of the neoliberal elite. In short, it is not a case of the NYT being not progressive enough for a few of the most zealous commies; in their (our) interpretation, it is unambiguiously an anti-Left force.
So you mean… I could really use another drink right now? Yeah, sure, that’s what I was thinking too! Can’t hurt...
democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character
I have 0.75 confidence that you’ve never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different—that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?” Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it’s always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review—by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people—of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
The worst thing is… my crap doesn’t just mildly degrade the “overall” signal to noise ratio (I disagree that this could be a coherent metric, especially in arguments directly related to actually existing socieies) - it outright hurts the (ever-precarious) position of “my” side, and doesn’t even encourage my allies on any problematic topic to put forward a better denouncement of “hostile” content here. Yet silence and aquiescence feel even more humiliating to me than making a fool of myself on LW.
I know, I know. If I was writing this with any actual goal-oriented hope for positive change on LW, I would’ve tried to bridge the inferential distance. But hell, I’m just a miserable and depressed cranky guy. Not even in gender studies. Sigh.
You know part of why I’ve been posting such low quality, counter-productive (passive)-aggressive remarks recently? I still remember that buzz, that breathtaking feeling of half-delight and half-awe when I discovered the LW community and read the Sequences two years ago. Here are some of the most insightful, kickass people I could realistically talk to and learn together with, it said. And now noticing all the terrifying, fascist-leaning political undercurrents that pervade the community, I feel zero joy at the thought of just averting my eyes and staying for the “Awesome Rational Shoes” stuff and smart conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, Eliezer on his own is still just as ultra-badass as ever. But the honeymoon is definitely over for me.
Ann Coulter, suffrage pessimist?
Well, you’re going to find literally hundreds of women with outspoken feminist ideas to one outspoken Ann Coulter, so… Okay, let’s be generous and say that she and Andrea Dworkin, a fierce critic of anti-feminist women, cancel each other out. Then you’re still going to get far more women with explicitly and implicitly feminist aliefs. Even when they self-identify as “conservative” for cultural or political reasons, have a negative perception of feminist activism, etc. The public image of “feminism” might not be so great, but women by and large seem to genuinely stand behind feminist convictions Could it be because most women recognize women’s social and economic self-interest better than most men?
It’s not obvious to me that one needs to be of a group to comment about that group
Making certain types of comments from certain socioeconomic positions relative to the group in question is a huge, terrible epistemic hazard, which is so for pretty much the same reasons as the generally corrupting nature of power.
How about I “poll” you about your current happiness, check your body language and such, then kidnap you, screw with your mind through typical abuser tactics, then pump you full of heroin and repeat the “poll”?
HUGE SPOILER: Technically, historical materialism and economic determinism was first… yup, a core Marxist idea.
And even domestically, “liberated” women and “tolerated” minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
Way too sick of this shit on LW. And as usual, it’s by straight white middle-class dudebro who hypocritically preaches about the danger of epistemic corruption in evaluating society while connected to it.
Check your fucking privilege and let people from the groups you bring up do some talking for themselves.
Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.
Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.
The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.
--Bertold Brecht (via Benjamin Noys)
If you oppose a government policy that personally benefits you, you are a hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds you.
If you support the policy that benefits you, you are a greedy narcissist whose loyalty can be bought and sold.
...but neither of these are meaningfully bad things according to post-Machiavellian political thought. Machiavelli dismantled the virtue-centric, moralizing system of “naive” political thought—finding wise, moral and incorruptible men to control society, as argued by Plato or Aquinas—and showed how the strength of a republic is in its internal conflicts and contradictions, how a naked struggle of competing group interests can ultimately lead to dynamism and progress. This is what most people don’t understand about his legacy, and the great emancipatory power of making self-interest, not moralism the cornerstone of politics.
So yes, in some matters we’re hypocrites, in others we’re greedy narcissists… but society holds more hope for all of its warring factions when these facts are honestly acknowledged rather than wrapped in a cloak of “virtue”-moralism! And pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest has very little cross-over with following moral codes in day-to-day interactions, anyway. (No examples for either Blue or Green, let’s pretend to be civil.)
...
So, (like almost everyone in earlier times), today’s citizens succumb to a vaguely Catholic-flavoured way of seeing society, and end up less politically progressive than a 15th century theorist. Who unjustly acquired the reputation of someone between Marquis de Sade[1] and Emperor Palpatine- not without the help of 19th century clericals and reactionaries.
[1] Early libertarian socialist, proto-feminist and human rights advocate. Never ever got a fair shake either.
… that is not rationality that is a mild infohazard trying to hack you into taking actions that make people starve.
Exactly.
Seriously why would you post that as a rationality quote.
Because many people in the LW sphere seem to love the same ideas in better and more refined wrapping! See the aforementioned Caplan, Anissimov, etc for just a couple of famous ones.
(Oh, and Vladimir_M, who before his departure also often provided respectability to awful shit, like rampant anti-feminism, demonizing people on welfare, etc. He’s probably my most hated high-karma poster here.)
Haha, no shit.
(Source: family experience.)
“Aw, you can’t feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?”
Pax Dickinson, former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, on rational family planning in the context of modern capitalism.
(in response to “That’s perhaps an argument for the parents to starve but the children are moral innocents wrt their creation. Solutions?”) - “If you remove all consequences to children from their parents stupid behavior, how will they ever learn any better?”
Him again on personal responsibility, setting proper incentives for the lazy masses, and learning one’s place in society early on.
That there are a few racial pseudoscience believers in the audience doesn’t change genocide being wrong, just as there being a few homeopathy users in the audience doesn’t change fraud being wrong.
Perhaps you haven’t read much of those folks? (Not that I blame you, it can be stomach-turning.) They claim that they’re the voice of Actual Science on human sociobiology. It is the accepted consensus of polite society today—that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-”white” people aren’t, as a group, cognitively inferior/inherently antisocial/undesirable—that they accuse of being ideologically corrupt pseudoscience.
They’re very insistent on the fact that theirs is the True Enlightened Scientific racism, and that, therefore, there’s nothing irrational or wrong with the stereotypes they deal in. Many—like, say, Mencius Moldbug—fancy placing themselves in opposition to the “vulgar” and “unreasoned” xenophobes, even as they espouse similar policy measures (barbed wire and apartheid 2.0).
P.S.: “in the audience”? In these circles at least, a few of them—like the aforementioned bloggers—are undoubtedly on the stage as well. Hell, Anissimov held the post of Media Director or something. (He claims his firing to be unrelated, and not damage control by SIAI.)
I must say this is a bit… awe-inspiring, in the older sense of the word. As in, reading this gave me a knot in the stomach and I shivered. People who played as the AI and won, how is it that you’re so uncannily brilliant?
The very notion of a razor-sharp mind like this ever acting against me and mine in real life… oh, it’s just nightmare-inducing.
On the subject of massively updating one’s beliefs where one was previously confident that no argument would shift them: yes, it happens, I have personal experience. For example, over the last year and a half some of my political ideas have changed enough that past-me and present-me would consider each other to be dangerously deluded. (As a brief summary, I previously held democracy/universal suffrage, the value of free markets AND the use of political violence in some contempt; now I believe that all three serve crucial and often-overlooked functions in social progress.)
So yes, I could very easily see myself being beaten as a Gatekeeper. There are likely many, many lines of argument and persuasion out there that I could not resist for long.
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Leaving aside all moral considerations of collective responsibility and individual complicity… and switching to my rough model of preference utilitarianism, which I generally don’t use… this would sound like an incredible, unbelievably lucky bargain with this cruel universe at HALF a life for a freed slave. At 18,75% it appears perverse even to hesitate in this non-dilemma.
P.S.: instead of preference utilitarianism, I do find it much more comfortable to use broadly Christian virtue ethics for a snap moral decision. According to which… well, let’s just mention that even a Catholic like Chesterton could be unapologetic in his respect for the Jacobins. Never mind the Christian abolitionists of the day.