Corvos
8mo ago
Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.
This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception.
This is exactly what the neoreactionary critique gets at, though. In this scenario, the process is your king; your final authority. And because those processes are carried out by people, ultimately those people are your kings.
In short, this way of thinking creates and sustains an oligarchic form of government. Don’t like the process? Don’t like who runs it? Then appeal. By what means? A process. Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.
Honestly, I agree with you that this is probably the best way of doing things a lot of the time, as opposed to direct personal power or mob democracy. But this flaw is inherent and IMO when the bureaucracy gets too powerful and too uniform then this form of government starts to curdle.
Corvos
1yr ago
I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.
I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.
What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:
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Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)
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Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.
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Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.
In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.
In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of White person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere [...]
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of White people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.
They have no destiny except under the [boot].
The Hanania pill seems to consist of arrogant shitstirrers realising that they loathe most white people just like they loathe everyone else.
They seemed more like ... modern Europeans.
God forbid.
I'm answering twice, but I think the main reason for the rather forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing. It's hard to defend things like closing all schools for a year now that nobody's frightened of Covid any more, so they're whistling nonchalantly and desperately trying to forget it. Nobody influential will try to bring it up again because there's almost certainly public proof that they went all in on it too.
It takes a lot of guts and moral stringency to think back and realise that you panicked and smashed our society to slivers for almost nothing. Very few people, public or private, are capable of that.
Corvos
2mo ago
I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.
So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.
I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to write these posts. As I understand it, your argument is more or less as follows:
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There is a large inferential distance between yourself, as a former soldier and a representative of the Red tribe, and most of us on this forum, who went to university young and are mostly some form of international knowledge worker.
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This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking. As with the matrix, only a situation that forcibly relocates our worldview will allow us to see what you're getting at.
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This inference gap, to the extent that we're capable of seeing it, is basically that we ultimately see things in a systemising, academic way. We are armchair professors who sit down and discuss abstract ideas like race, class, representation. We believe in the existence and importance of Society with a big S. We spend most of our lives in urban environments where social convention and rules are more relevant than fundamental natural laws.
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Because we discuss in those terms, we're incapable of stepping back and seeing that this is all just people. By discussing the culture war, we inevitably find ourselves seeing the world on the culture war's terms. You aren't sitting in traffic, you are traffic.
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Therefore it is acceptable to describe the average Mottizen as a progressive, even if we vehemently reject that classification, because ultimately it's true. From the perspective of one who can stand outside, we are part of a modern movement which uses a lens that is fundamentally incompatible with what we say we would like to conserve.
@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it? I have thoughts but will put them in a different comment.
I think the protests in China had an effect. Being a Covid hawk went from being “one of the responsible people” to “I think that China was right to weld starving people in their apartments and kill that one guy’s dog.”
Obviously a more nuanced position is possible, but not on Twitter :)
Then China opened up and as far as I’m aware nothing happened. Plus the lockdown spirit has metastasised into the UN, public health and the civil service where it’s harder to see; most of the remaining Covid hawks are focused on minimising discussion of lockdowns at all rather than litigating it in the public eye.
Corvos
3mo ago
Data point of one, but the only Singaporean I've known loathed the army, loathed having been a conscript, and deeply resented the government for having deprived him of two years that he could have spent staying competitive with international students. He described a world of complete incompetence and lethargy, because none of the conscripts expect to stay on and therefore none of them have any incentive to work. They just rot for two years. And the cynicism has become institutional, so it's hard for even enthusiastic conscripts to escape the pull.
I'm torn on the subject, personally. The advantages of a well-run conscript system are clear, but it's expensive to run and encourages corruption and (often) dislike of the army. Similar to forced Irish teaching in Irish schools. The Brits used to have a fairly good system where you could sign up for the officer cadets (or something to that effect) and spend one weekend per month doing fun, interesting exercises that also made you a little bit of money. Most people didn't stay on, but many did and the ones who left still had acquaintances in the army and an appreciation for army life. We stopped doing it because it was too expensive. And I doubt that one could afford to do it for the poor bloody infantry.
Scott’s article lists ways we could regulate love but don’t, including:
- Dating licenses can be revoked for sufficiently serious crimes - eg cheating, domestic abuse, or persistent alcoholism/drug use.
- Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life.
We have this, it’s called marriage. Historically the community has regulated love quite closely, and its recent failure to do so has led to plummeting birth rates, MeToo, and record levels of celibacy.
It is also the case that Scott is a rich man with a literal harem. As he says himself:
my wife is objectively the best person in the world, and I can’t be fully dissatisfied with any system that allowed me to find her.
People who do well under the current system want to keep it. Incels and people whose wages were driven down by cheap labour don't, for obvious reasons.
EDIT: A number of people commented saying that Scott had given up the polyamory post-marriage. Quote from Highlights From the Comments on Polyamory:
"I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly."
Corvos
9mo ago
I think that Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse qualifies. The first Peter dies and has his mantle taken up by the black Miles Morales. The second Peter doesn’t die for Miles but it’s clear he’s prepared to, and his story is that of a white screwup being redeemed by tutoring a non-white replacement.
Corvos
8mo ago
Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality.
That’s exactly the point under discussion, no? The allegation from trump’s side is that this has already happened, and that following standard procedure for resolving disputed elections is therefore meaningless because the entire bureaucracy is controlled by the enemy.
Personally, though, I was thinking of the Civil Service, who I very definitely can’t vote out of office. From where I’m standing Britain has been in that closed loop for at least 20 years now.
Corvos
9mo ago
Sometimes I forget how incredible the future is going to be.
Why do you think you're going to benefit from any of this?
@self_made_human has already expressed concerns about being pushed out by AI and I don't know your situation but unless you're on the board of a big corporation I don't think you have any leverage over the development and adoption of these advances.
In short, I agree with Scott's Meditations on Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). One of the few mechanisms that limits a race to the bottom is the physical and mental limits on what humans can endure. Transhumanism promises to make these limits programmable.
We simply try to replace missing limbs with adequate artifical counterparts, and then market forces inevitably at least try and make them better than the real deal.
In video games, market forces gave us fun games with ever-increasing graphic fidelity and then veered sideways into DLC, lootboxes, and other exploitative practices because that's where the money was. Market forces gave us the world wide web and then swiftly optimised it for ad exposure and addiction. What makes you think your new limbs won't have a shelf life of only a few years like smartphones do, so that walking becomes effectively a subscription service?
we proceed to robust gene therapy
Which will at best be required to compete with your colleagues on an even footing, as adderall seems increasingly to be. At worst, we will finally be able to rid the majority of humanity of the primal impulses that make them resist the obviously-correct rule of their betters: conservativism, religion, the desire for personal fulfilment...
until we breakthrough and cure aging
Bluntly, what makes you think that the people who develop and own these technologies will want to spend eternity with you?
(Continued from the above)
I have some innate sympathy with this position, because I have personally known very intelligent people who had blindspots you could drive a bus through and they couldn't see it however gently you led them.
I used to think somewhat similarly to you (perhaps, inferential distance and all that). I was a Cameron Conservative in the UK (kind of like a Reaganite conservative in the US). I really believed in colourblindness, and treating everyone as an individual, and in equality of opportunity. I scoffed at left-wing abstractions like the Establishment, manufactured consent, class conflict. Most of my extended family were army officers.
And then the wind changed.
Without any particular intention to do so, I got caught up in a proto-Culture War conflicts in 2015/2016. I won't bore you with the details, but I learned very quickly that what was said did not matter. There was no meaningful possibility of persuasion. The way you won conflicts was by controlling the people who were in the room to vote. The usual mechanisms for that were to get the committee secretary to slip in lots of boring business before the meaty stuff, so that anyone who didn't care enough to listen through hours of bullshit and miss supper left, and by making life miserable enough for the people who stayed that they didn't come back. I also learned that it's impossible for a man to win a public argument with a crying woman.
The Brexit vote happened maybe a year later. The pattern was stark. Mostly the university staff (cooks, cleaners, etc. were in favour). Every single academic and student was against. Every. Single. One. Even outside academia, again and again I would find myself the only one in the room. At best people would be interested, at worst they would say vile things without even considering the possibility that someone like me could exist. (Those who expressed doubts about mass vaccination during Covid will recognise the feeling). The Establishment did exist, and I'd just fallen out of it.
By your taxonomy, maybe this makes me a failed progressive, I'm not sure. But what I feel like is a failed Conservative. I tried to be an individualist and I found that in this place and at this time, individualism is wrong. There really do exist mass movements of people that you describe with an abstraction like "whites" or "blacks" or "the Establishment". In a world ruled by identarian leftists, which one of those groups you get pattern-matched to, and the relative status of that group, really does matter - it changes what you can do, what you can say, and the consequences for doing so.*
The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive. A predator has appeared that exploits its weaknesses with great efficiency. The Kendi card beats the MLK card at trumps. You can sit there in splendid isolation as you lose your money, happy that you stayed true to yourself, or you can find a different card.
I don't know what that card looks like. Accusations of anti-semitism were very powerful against Corbyn, groomer discourse seems to get somewhere. To be honest, I think it's too late for the UK - we've imported too many immigrants and we have too few children. We are going to be cursed with a permanent disaffected ethnic minority and the resultant identity politics from now on and I can't see anything we can do about it in the time left. So it goes, I guess.
But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong.
*I have a strong feeling that you are going to say, "Nope, you can say and do whatever you like. That's your decision, and the consequences will be whatever they are." Bugger that. There was a time I didn't have to self-immolate to have a sensible conversation and I want that time back, please. And call me a coward, but if I'm going to kamikaze I want a reasonable estimated return on investment.
Corvos
9mo ago
Counter-argument: if you roll out a vaccine to the entire population without waiting long enough to see if there are delayed side effects, you could do a LOT of damage.
The man who does the wrong thing enthusiastically is a bad man. The man who does the right thing at great cost is a hero. Somebody who does what he can, when he can, is just a man.
I look up to people who do brave things, but I don't think it's fair to look down on people for not being superhuman. That said, people should exert what agency they do have - I just find the philosophy implied by "Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit." a bit too yeschaddish for my tastes.
Corvos
8mo ago
I don’t think the difference exists. Partly because the “spouse” appears to be just someone the candidate is fucking. Mostly because my objection is that one of the responsibilities of people in a hierarchy is to behave well to the people below them. That means giving applicants a fair shake and it means promoting people because of seniority, talent and experience, not because of who they’re having sex with.
Corvos
9mo ago
Thanks for the link! Certainly, I would be interested to know if those are the true numbers.
At the risk of being callous, though, the data shows that given up on lockdown increased the risk of death for over-65s in a mostly unvaccinated population by 30% over the usual. Bad, obviously, but I remember the Covid hawk position as being a lot stronger than that. I don't think this backs them up.
Corvos
4mo ago
I would be very interested to read that case. My understanding was that you get a problem where the amount of precious metals stays constant while your economy grows, leading to either re-evaluation of all currency or a lack of money. More rarely the opposite can happen, as in the case wheee the Spanish discovered a silver mine and suddenly had a mass inflation of their silver currency.
Corvos
6mo ago
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland)
You seem to be assuming your conclusion here. If what you state above is true, the rest of your argument may follow, but it seems to be a classic case of applying economic theory and then assuming that everyone is a moron for not going along with your conclusions, rather than disagreeing with your analysis.
From where I’m standing, houses have some fairly unique attributes: the supply is zero-sum in the UK as you note, everyone needs one (or a part of one, I’m including flats and things), realistically nobody needs more than one.
It is not obvious to me that making it very difficult to be a landlord would make it harder to obtain shelter. A plausible consequence of increased tax would be for landlords to sell up and the available housing stock to rise, thus lowering house prices.
As it is, we have a situation where it is entirely viable (though becoming less so) to get somebody else to pay your mortgage for you, and property serves as a useful asset for native or foreign oligarchs to store wealth. I’m not sure that this is innately desirable.
This isn’t an ‘eat the rich’ argument, or an argument for rent control. I’m just dubious about facilitating the treatment of shelter as an asset class and would like to hear your reasoning on the matter.
Corvos
8mo ago
How involved are you in academia? It’s incredibly competitive - depends on the field but usually only a tiny fraction of postgraduate students move on to being full-time paid academics. And getting a position because of who you’re sleeping with is the dictionary definition of nepotism. At least if they limited it to marriage or shared children there would be a higher bar to climb. I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.
For doctors it makes more sense to me. I’m not one so maybe I’m missing subtleties but within bars like rural / urban / deprived I would have thought that doctors and positions were pretty much interchangeable so it doesn’t seem unfair.
Fair enough. Serious question: What is your plan for obtaining a critical mass?
From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each. Those bodies exist in the vicinity of many, many other bodies and so, whether either of us like it or not, they must contend with game theory.
The power of tyranny comes from fear. Fear is generated and maintained by observing punishment. Every time someone stands up for their principles without a plan to survive doing so (or at least to extract net benefit), I believe they are making of themselves a sacrifice to feed what they hate. So the outcome matters. Whether your beliefs work in situ matters. I’m not arguing for nihilistic pursuit of gain, but I am arguing for pragmatism, and sacrificing your lower-level principles when they’re sabotaging your ultimate ones.
Going to push back a bit on "the early 90s [were] the true golden age of the West". The way I remember it, there was a lot of abundance but also a deep ideological conformity and a corrosive cynicism. I remember the 00s better but I remember it as a time that was resolutely anti-ideological, such that any hint of sincerity was mocked and any possibility that we hadn't discovered the only philosophy man would ever need was almost incomprehensible. The great questions of life were regarded as solved or irrelevant.
Our current crisis is unpleasant in many ways but at least we know the wokeness exists. It's something that one can recognise when implemented, it's something that you can identify with or stand against (even if one is afraid to stand against it publicly). There is far more, and better, free thought now than there was in the 90s and 00s.
To be fair, meritocracy as we know it is very recent, and absolutely deserves to be called an "ocracy". Or perhaps an "ism"?
Until very recently in the US and UK, pretty much all lucrative and/or important jobs were distributed through a system of patronage. If you read about the late 1800s it's clear that the move from "this person supports me and should be rewarded" to "important jobs should be obtained by passing a set of exams (or proving your worth in other ways) regardless of the recipient's allegiance" was an explicitly political movement. In the UK you had civil service reform after the Trevelyan report; in the US you had the Civil Service Reform Act.
In the US at least, this movement was strongly opposed by supports of the spoils system, partly for the obvious reason, partly because it removed the ability of governments to ensure that lower levels of the bureaucracy were in line with their leaders. Given the fact that it has become totally impossible for right-wing movements to govern because of an entrenched and hostile bureaucratic class, I think they had a point.
You also have complementary movements in the 1900s campaigning against choosing people to do jobs based on family ties (nepotism), ethnic group (racism), class, religion, etc.
In short, what we now think of as meritocracy is not the natural state of affairs but the result of a strong government forcing people to hire in ways that lawmakers think is optimal. Which is what you’re saying I suppose but I don’t think Freddie is misunderstanding anything. He believes that the long-term benefit argument is mostly made by self-serving high-iq people and wants to see money allocated in a different way.
Which I oppose, though I’d be a happy man if more right wingers could get it drummed through their head that personnel is policy.
There’s a long discussion downthread on the possibility/desirability of a truce between Ukraine and Russia. Moral considerations aside, a large number of commentators thought that it would be foolish to sue for peace under pretty much any circumstances because Putin wouldn’t keep to it.
It seems to me that refocusing efforts towards fortifying at/near the current de facto borders would change the calculus by making it much more painful to break a peace. I’m thinking especially wide-ranging minefields. As I understand it, this has made it quite difficult for Ukrainians to advance, could the same be made to work in reverse? And if so, how practical would it be to build up such defences in the current climate with current levels of international assistance?
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