Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Which is also a good way to handle pain in one's own life, emotional or physical. "It sucks, but..." is a powerful schema.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Also dont have sex with any woman who you have "power" over in your department.
I would just say "woman in your department", for the reasons you suggest later: PMC people in the US seem to strongly frown on workplace relationships. It's quite a contrast with European academia, which in my experience feels like a badly written porn film half the time.
your average woman
I wouldn't put it this way, even though I think you're onto something.
I would say that a relatively high proportion of women aren't very interested in ideas or things, but people. (These being a good general categorisation of interests.) So, if a woman is even moderately interested in ideas or things, she really stands out. Similarly, to be regarded as an "fascinating conversationalist" by women on dates, a man just needs to be able to hold an interesting and intriguing conversation about people, rather than his car or sportsball team's stats.
I see this in academia: even if a woman is interested in engineering ethics, technology and psychology, physics and people etc., she will stand out as more interested in ideas/things than most women, and have a lot of dates, mentoring offers, invitations to conferences and so on. She becomes a big bait in a small pond of fish starving for a Woman in X. As always, it helps if she's at least presentably attractive.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think there are some trends that might help conservatives in areas like Hollywood. China is increasingly important for making a profit with films, games etc. The Chinese government insists on Family Friendly entertainment, while comic book hero-style stories are what Chinese audiences apparently likes from the West.
One precedent is 80s action movies. Home video, plus a Hollywood system that had grown sceptical of indulging "genius" New Hollywood directors after flops like Heaven's Gate, led to the production of a lot of conservative-leaning action films. Think Cobra, Rambo, Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Red Heat, Death Wish etc. etc. Even Aliens has a heroine who is appealing to both conservatives and liberals: the warrior mother is a figure in conservative iconography that goes back centuries; her violence stems from protective maternal instincts that conservatives laud, and she confronts men only insofar as they are weak. Similar women are a stock figure of Western culture, at least in Northern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Douglas
There's also e.g. the Rocky films from that period, which are some of the best examples I know of traditional working-class American conservative values: nobody owes you anything, work hard, respect your elders, family comes first, don't forget where you came from, stand up for yourself etc. These values are popular among high-orderliness people in pretty much every culture, including China.
Of course, as some people here have already noted, the problems for conservative culture production seem to be more supply-side than demand-side. However, I think that 80s action has lessons here as well. Stallone wasn't consistently a big star until the 80s: Rocky and Rocky II were exceptions in a career of failure and disappointment. Ahnold, Dolph, Church Norris, etc. came from outside the standard Hollywood system. Charles Bronson was a salty veteran and Michael Winner (the Death Wish director) was a sleazy Limey:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=efl5pFTFnBU
So a conservative director looking to make an action movie should try to make something Chinese friendly and go outside the box for the star, e.g. a wrestler, MMA fighter, or boxer as the lead.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.
Biden's alleged improprieties didn't help either. In 2020, many MeToo activists had to say things like "We never meant believe all women, we meant don't automatically disbelieve women, but let them speak their story."
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.
As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association. For example, Julie Bindel is far to the left of almost all of her critics, on most issues. Controversies-of-the-day create weird alliances: think of Christopher Hitchens and neoconservatives on the Iraq War.
The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?
This is the problem brought up in David Stove's What's Wrong with Benevolence? His answer to the title is: nothing, if it is combined with other virtues. The elevation of benevolence to the status of fundamental virtue, which began around the 18th century and which was accelerated by utilitarians.
What is required is the recognition that other virtues have a fundamental value, e.g. justice and prudence. This is not easy, even if the arguments are good, because most people are highly agreeable (in the Big Five sense) so they fear conflict, and they tend to see benevolence as a route to conflict-avoidance: "If only we are kind enough to the unhoused darlings, they won't cause any trouble to us."
It's the same dynamic with a lot of woke activism. Disagreeable radicals can bully around most people, because most people's default model for handling such conflicts is to bend the knee and hope it saves their own necks.
So elevating benevolence as the sole virtue has the persuasive power of elevating most people's submissive natures into approved virtues, and hence it has both philosophical arguments and self-interest in its favour. That's also why people's benevolence tends to extend to e.g. accepting misbehaviour by the homeless, but not Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk and donating all your income to the poor. Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Men are physically stronger and so have the option of choosing a blue-collar of manual-labor career. Women pretty much have to do intellectual labor (or marry a rich husband) to be successful.
I thought of it the other way around: due to higher conscientiousness (in adolescence at least) and agreeableness, girls will do better at school - at least up until grad school - and this gives them the pick of what they study. Due to higher interest in people over things or ideas, plus somewhat higher Big Five Neuroticism, females tend to prefer the humanities and social sciences, as well as jobs like teaching and HR, even when these don't pay well, because they are relatively secure and very people-orientated. Insofar as women aren't smart, there are people-orientated jobs in retail, childcare etc.
This leaves everything else for men, whose choices are also influenced by the way that certain subjects and jobs become coded as "girly". Insofar as men are smart, they can end up in relatively well-paid jobs that aren't fun and which are maybe insecure. Insofar as they aren't, there are jobs where they can do better if they're strong and/or well-coordinated. If a man isn't smart or strong or well-coordinated, things start getting very tough.
I have been through grad school and its academic extensions. One interesting factor is that, as the conscientiousness gap narrows in people's late 20s, and very high agreeableness becomes less of an advantageous trait (your supervisor might even like it if you respectfully disagree with them) the competitions among men and women become more even. Obsessive interest in the subject becomes more important, which tends to be an advantage for men in thing and idea orientated subjects. For various reasons, women still have an advantage, including in the academic job market (I think partly because entry-level jobs in academia are mostly about being nice, compliant, caring, and diligent) but the hyper-productive young academics that I know are almost all male. So you end up with e.g. men publishing more and women having an easier time getting opportunities to publish.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women...
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
As Eric Cartman put it in a slightly different context: "Hippies! They're everywhere! They wanna save Earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
The stranger part to US ears (perhaps) is that this is mainly pushed by the more left/woke type of people. While I know that other Anglo countries do like to integrate indigenous spirituality into land acknowledgements etc, I believe only the NZ public service has gone out to this extent.
The key asymmetry, as with Islam, is that people on the left tend to see indigenous spirituality as non-threatening, whereas the threat of a return to the dark ages of white Christianity (like the 1950s) is still a big fear, especially in the US. Of course, very liberal Christianity and black Christianity of any kind doesn't attract the same fear, because they are either liberal, seen as not a threat (and likely to change their minds as they progress anyway) or both.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
No, I think that that's hyperbole. If someone put out a movie with an all-white cast, there might be some grumbling on Twitter or whatnot, but no serious consequences.
See The Northman. As I recall, an all-white cast (or close enough) and it flew under the woke radar almost completely. Sadly, not a lot of people watched it in general, because it was very good.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
And I'm really getting tired of marketing by fan-baiting.
Tiredness is definitely my impression of the whole Rings of Power stuff. The old media hype, the production, the casting, the hate-videos on Youtube... There's nothing new or creative in any of it. I don't see an ounce of creative passion anywhere in the whole thing. It's like someone secretly upgraded Stable Diffusion to create a whole media circus based on past glories of hype, e.g. Ghostbusters 2016 or Gamergate.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Some of my relatives are from South Africa or are Zambians who lived there back in the 1990s. It was not this bad at all. In fact, IIRC, they remember the period from the winding-down of Apartheid to some time in the Noughties as a golden age of relative social harmony and optimism.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
In my experience, the response of men about this depends on the context.
All male company: We pretend to be more averse to commitment than we really are.
Mixed company: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself."
The most successful counterstrategy I know is to signal boost (and even fabricate) cases of largesse that is not being cut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left
This was sufficiently successful that, when the generally nonpartisan Yes, Minister TV series had an episode with Thames Marsh local council, who had cut all civil defence but kept open the "gay bereavement centre" (and a small bunker for the council leader) this was something that the audience could recognise and accept easily. It also meant that, even as the UK Labour party moved somewhat to the right between the 1983 and 1987 elections, they were still associated with radical socialism and social progressivism, due to their association with "loony left" local councils.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color.
Insofar as I have a problem with it, it's that the Lord of the Rings was a substitute for the loss of Anglo-Saxon mythology. Unlike the Greeks, Vikings, or Romans, we (I'm half Anglo-Saxon) don't have a surviving corpus of cool sagas/myths, but Tolkien did an amazing job of filling in that gap in Anglo-Saxon culture.
But there was nothing particularly Anglo-Saxon about the Peter Jackson films (e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...) so this isn't a new problem.
Similarly, the fact that the race-swapping etc. is so forced is off-putting, but I also didn't like how Arwen's character was changed to fit with modern sensibilities in the Fellowship of the Ring film. Off-putting, but not the end of the world.
My personal case for not watching it is that I found The Hobbit films that I saw (Hobbit I and Hobbit III) painful to watch, and I didn't like the Lord of the Rings films that much anyway. I enjoyed all the Tolkien I've read a lot, but just like they can't make a Madeline L'Engle film to match her brilliance, I have accepted that Tolkien will never be great on screen. The closest that match the awe-inspiring images I have in my head as I read Tolkien was a few moments in the 1978 Lord of the Rings and in the original Peter Jackson trilogy. The rest is meh at best.
Same with Dune, except that I thought the most recent Dune film was at least worth my time watching, unlike anything done with Tolkien's works for nearly 20 years...
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Anecdotal: I have a look recently at women playing Super Seducer. I thought it might be an insight into how at least some of them think of seduction and dating. Plus, Richard La Ruina operates in an interesting borderland of acceptability, where e.g. the woker girl gamers feel like they should demonise him but keep on saying "Huh, that's actually good advice."
Where they tend to fail is that their basic plan for a man to pursue a woman is to try and make them his friend. This makes sense: for straight women and even lesbians, befriending is their main interaction with other women. Many women, even seemingly "awkward" women, are actually very good at this task. They know how to flatter women, find common interests, make women feel comfortable around them etc.
While these skills can obviously be useful for dating women, it's not surprising that a lot of these women's advice are textbook paths to the friendzone, because that's what they're designed to do.
Also, even if a woman thinks "How do guys seduce me?" it's hard to answer that honestly, because a woman being seduced is potentially a status loss, so it's necessary to say things like "He has to know me for months and be kind and just treat me like any other friend" etc., because something like "His best strategy is to be confident, asserive, push things forward, one step ahead, and stand out from all my other guy friends in some way" suggests that she's prone to manipulation, and nobody likes to admit that. Men too: I have seem men been obviously lured into a relationship and hate to admit that the woman was actually the one coordinating the interaction. Never me, of course...
Harlequin5942
2mo ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Can you give 5 examples, please?
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad".
No, this has always been their position when it comes to Israel vs. Palestine. I also remember similar people, back in 2001, suggesting or outright saying that the US brought 9/11 on themselves.
Good higher-order thinking.
I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this. My own pet theory, which I'm not sure about, is that Going Woke is a way to handle creative bankrupcy: if you have nothing else to say, raceswap. It's similar to saying that your film is "about family" when it's just a mesh of committee-approved special effects and kewl moments. Rings of Power was just a notable example of this failing, but it still probably helped them ceteris paribus, because they had literally nothing else to do.
There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.
But even fewer people would care. I am a fantasy fan and I didn't even know that WoC had any LoTR franchising rights until I saw your comment, mainly because I have zoned out of any new LoTR stuff for nearly 2 decades, because it's boring, committee-driven, and safer than a child whose parents make him wear a crash helmet before he goes on a climbing frame. Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?
Women control access to reproduction.
This is oversimplified.
Women tend to control access to sex: most men are more willing to screw a wider range of women than women are willing to screw men.
Men tend to control access to commitment: most men are more attracted by the idea of avoiding being tied down (figuratively, not literally). One of the more absurd things I see in these discussions is the notion that men are desperate to get married, have a lot of kids, and have said wife/kids impressing demands on these men's precious time. It's like when Chat GPT suggests "MOAR feminism!" as a solution for low birth rates: it's going against what I thought was basic knowledge about male/female psychological differences in humans, which has been deeply ingrained in our cultures since before the invention of writing.
Perhaps the "men are frustrated in their efforts to get tied down to a life of changing nappies and sleeping with just one woman" online memes comes from incels who think that, if only they had the chance, they'd be women's Perfect Partner, as in Futurama: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself." "Does that robot have a brother?". However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position. Then, as naturally tends to happen, they found a woman that they wanted to sleep with repeatedly, developed an emotional bond, and married. I suspect that this is healthier than both the man and the woman being keen on commitment: just as sexual romance needs a partner to be seduced, marriage needs at least one partner to need to be (non-verbally) persuaded that a long-term commitment makes sense. After all, commitment is good for the economy:
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Related: David Burns has a motivational theory of human communication, including romantic relationships. The idea is that the most common cause of problems is motivation, not skill. This is contrary to the standard model, which is that communication is primarily about having the right skills, so you can read body language, tones of voice, choose your words correctly, push people's buttons in the right way etc.
A problem with the standard model is that even many mentally retarded people are able to have fulfilling and happy relationships, despite crappy communication skills and a cognitive inability to master them. One of my high school friends is retarded, but he has a stable and happy relationship with an autistic woman who shares his interests and challenges. They work together very effectively as a team, and they manage to hold down (basic) full-time jobs despite their cognitive impediments. Why? They are highly motivated and willing to do the (VERY) hard work of being together.
I suspect that most relationship advice is useless for most people who read it, because they have some mix of (a) process resistance and (b) outcome resistance.
Process resistance: "I shouldn't have to work so hard to find and keep a partner!" "It's too scary to face rejection." "Why should I be the one to make all the effort?"
Outcome resistance: "I don't want to risk being cucked. It's safer to be single." "I want a relationship, but I don't want to lose my independence." "I'm not looking for the One, but the one before the One."
With these cognitions, people can have all the communication skills, attractiveness, and so on in the world, but still be unable to develop satisfying relationships. Even if they do happen to find an interested and desirable partner, it won't work out, because they lack the appropriate motivation.
"How many single people does it take to screw a lightbulb?"
"Just one, but the person and the lightbulb must be motivated to screw."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
it's a victimless crime
I think that it's not so much a victimless crime as a non-coercive one. Suppose that a comedian is very good at doing impressions of Joe Biden. Imagine that the comedian's impressions are so good that Biden's public image suffers enough to flip a few states and enable Trump to win the 2020 election. Was Biden a victim, in a non-trivial sense? It seems natural to say yes, but even Biden wouldn't want the comedian banned on that basis. People do not have a right to a good public image.
Alternatively, suppose that a journalist sneaks into Biden's private residence, takes a picture of him on the toilet, and then puts that picture online. The journalist has violated Biden's privacy and should be punished. There's a crime, but not just because there was a victim of the journalist's actions.
Is AI nudes generation more like the first example or the second example? I think it's like the first example. There doesn't seem to be a principled distinction between good impressions/drawings/etc. and deepfakes.
However, if a deepfake is being presented as someone, then I suppose that could be a good target for the law. Similarly, if somebody who looks a lot like Biden does an impression of him going into somewhere that his voters would regard as sordid - like a conference for conversion therapy techniques - and presents a video of this act as the real thing, I can see grounds for punishment.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.
Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.
Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.
Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy
Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/
Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.
Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE
This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.
This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.
Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.
As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.
Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!
Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.
As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.
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