Goodguy
24d ago
It's always hard to say who is irreversibly committed to an ideology and who isn't. Many religious people were atheists when younger. Many atheists were hardcore religious when younger. And it's easy to, for example, find conservatives who were hardcore communists earlier in life. David Horowitz is a famous example.
Goodguy
26d ago
I somewhat disagree. You're probably right in general. However, there is a strain of right-wing thought, and there has been for a long time, that isn't pro-life - it just thinks that life sucks and the desire to reproduce is a cheap joke that nature instilled in people, but also thinks that even despite all that, whatever decent things exist in life are more likely to be perpetuated by right-wing politics than left-wing politics. The stereotypical highly-online right-winger these days might be a trad "let's have 10 kids" type, but this is not the only type of right-wing thought.
I myself am not anti-life or a philosophical pessimist, but I have enjoyed and perhaps benefited from reading such strains of thought.
Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.
That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.
But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.
Goodguy
26d ago
I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about anti-natalism and natalism. I find it interesting that some people see anti-natalism as being a leftist phenomenon. I feel that this is true if you limit your understanding of leftism to stereotypical Redditors. However, historically speaking, philosophical pessimism, deep skepticism about the value of life, and doubt about the value of reproduction as anything other than an animal instinct are, I think, far from left-oriented. If you think about some of the most famous people who have held such views, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq... well, these are certainly not leftists by any common definition of leftist. And then there is Nietzsche who, even though in his writings he constantly insisted on the value of healthy virile life, did not leave any offspring even though, despite his various health problems, he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.
I do not think that being dubious of natalism is a right-wing phenomenon, but I also certainly do not think that it is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.
Thanks for this deep analysis, much of which I don't have the scientific background to understand. If I may ask, why would it take modern industrial chemistry to synthesize penicillin in useful quantities? I suppose that I have been wrong in thinking that it could be synthesized by pre-modern techniques?
Edit: I should also note that to me, a dabbler in mathematics, this survey of mathematical thought-trends and their impact on the history of mathematics is fascinating.
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
- Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
- Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
- Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
- Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
Goodguy
27d ago
Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists same as this anti-natalist? I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.
I wouldn't trust anything I read from an account on X, especially a high-profile account on X, to be real. Most high-profile X accounts who were not already famous before joining X are engagement bait grifters, and some of these grifters are precisely in the business of crafting scissor statements to get maximum engagement. Even if the genesis of this particular story is a real-life situation, I wouldn't trust a high-profile X account to convey it accurately instead of conveying it in order to mine maximum engagement. The entire nature of the medium, with its short clippy posts (yeah you can pay to write long ones, but this comes off as geeky so is not used as much as one might think) and its monetization, makes it a melting pot of scammers, grifters, and con artists. I have tried many times to start genuine political/cultural discussion on X, and 95% of the time it doesn't work. X rewards cheap engagement bait vastly more than it rewards serious conversation. It is a brutal Darwinian power struggle in which masters of scissor statements, controversy bait, and so on rise to the top.
I understand your other criteria to various degrees, but I still don't understand why I'm supposed to care so much about the number of past sex partners. It is pretty much irrelevant to me when evaluating a potential long-term romantic partner unless maybe it is so ridiculously high that it indicates some kind of actual severe sex addiction. But that would be a number in the high 100s, probably. Actually, for me it would probably be more important that the woman had had at least one sex partner in the past, rather than that she had not had too many. I'm not sure that I would want to take on the risk of being a wife's first sex partner and thus having her views of me passed through a filter of inexperience.
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