Tanista
1mo ago
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.
Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.
Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.
I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.
I could honestly never get into it either and I was very sympathetic towards that side of the Left. I think I did hear one full episode on Robin DiAngelo.
Going off that and my general sense of that side of the left: it all seems to be about feeding a demographic left behind by to the longhousing/PMCing of the Democratic party after the Hillary/Bernie fight, combined with a deeper resentment about the state of the economy from the downwardly mobile middle class types who read enough theory to be able to make it a socialist issue.
Tanista
1mo ago
I expect a red/black/blue millet system would make everyone happy.
Except for any group that derives its power from managing the relations between all of the others surely? Or any group that thinks it has more to gain from pooling resources with other groups? Between the two there's enough power/numbers to veto any such proposal.
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is.
They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.
And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.
Tanista
1mo ago
This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
How is the meaning of the word "woman" separate from the ground truth? The argument of the gender critical side is that the trans definition of woman is simply incoherent and anything close to the traditional definition simply returns false for the TWAW claim.
If anything, the idea that these things can be split has been mercifully killed by trans activists themselves: they claim some sort of sharp distinction but in practice what's happened is that anyone claiming the right to the term "woman" has at least a claim on all female privileges and rights no matter how self-evidently absurd it is.
So either the definition of trans is self-evidently incoherent or it's making a claim about the underlying facts (e.g. trans-identifying males are closer to females in their offending patterns in prison).
Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people.
The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters...
Part of the reason progressives don't seem to win with this argument in practice is that it depends on assumptions that prove dubious in practice: that only the richest of the rich will suffer (when social democracies as we know them today tax more across the board) or that taxing to create such broad benefits is costless.
Yes, UBI avoids the problem of means-tested systems that still end up giving disproportionate money to dubious cases. But it does so by simply ducking the problem of the bill that makes them want to discriminate in the first place.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too?
Maybe because leftists share the impulse that you categorized as conservative? That if the government is going to take a lot of your money out of your hands it should be some sort of emergency or going to a case so self-evidently worse off that it justifies the effort and isn't either a gain at the margins or an active loss to people seemingly incapable of making good use of it.
That isn't it solely - some seem deeply skeptical of UBI as a suggested welfare replacement, presumably because they're skeptical that you'll get a high enough UBI for unfortunates - but worth considering.
- I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
I actually think it's better without the concession to fuzziness. After all, what your UBI proposal has going for it here is that we theoretically know what everyone is going to get and so the spending is predictable. If we start adding new expectations you risk ending up with the very problem of throwing good money after bad to raise some people to a standard they seem incapable of in addition to the big bill.
Tanista
1mo ago
I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this.
Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.
His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy.
Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.
I said his program was hindered from the beginning by his means and probably ill-conceived because of the fundamental contradiction. This defense, imo, is just leaning on the same contradiction. This worked for Augustus because he was trying to institute monarchic rule.
A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.
Sulla revealed the secret of the Republic - that generals can order their men to commit violence against the state and thus capture it - and somehow thought he'd put it back in the bottle. It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.
I suppose we can say that this is all in hindsight. That it's easy to say it's wrong now precisely because we can appeal to Sulla's experience. Maybe, at the time, it seemed just as likely that he'd be a new Cincinnatus.
But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.
On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.
As opposed to the rational decisions of people like Cato whose level of obstinacy precipitated the very outcome they were supposedly against? Even when people like Pompey tried to respect at least the form of republican politics they were blocked and so made common cause with the populists. If anything one could argue that the Senators were playing games with things that were essential to the livelihood and comfort of the plebes. If they had been willing to take steps to address them rather than vetoing their enemies things might have been different.
The man died peacefully in his own bed.
He died, what? A few years after resigning? If Cicero had died within a similar timespan he would never have faced a reckoning for killing Catiline and it might have looked like a move with all upside too.
Tanista
1mo ago
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
Tanista
1mo ago
I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking
The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Tanista
1mo ago
By this analogy, it's pretty clear that these center-left politicians in question were mothers who were being told both by their older child and by tons of independent observers that she was being abusive and refused to entertain the possibility, because by their model of parenting, what appeared to the child and to independent observers as "abusive" was actually "nurture." Perhaps they're correct that it is actually "nurture;" however, the lack of concern for the possibility that it might not be is a reflection of an utter lack of motivation to actually nurture that older child
This is complicated by the fact that the younger child is also dead certain that they need this sort of nurturing and said child is sometimes clearly worse off . One might even grant that you're making the better off child slightly worse off and still believe the trade off is not only worth it but fair.
And there are, of course, observers and experts on both sides. There are plenty of others who will insist that the problem is that they haven't directed enough attention and effort to an underperforming child.
Imagine a mother steeped in a certain ideology, she reads only so many books a year but the ones on parenting involve figures with impressive degrees egging her on. She has some reason to continue.
Tanista
1mo ago
But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
- Both of these are forms of nurturing. Who hasn't been told "you have to take your brother as well"? Who hasn't seen someone torn into by a teacher for being cruel or insufficiently kind towards that kid in class with some issue? Who hasn't seen attempts by the nurturing elements in school to try to raise the self-esteem or status of some of the unfortunates?
- Progressives attempted a synthesis of both of these positions in 2020 under Biden: strong identity politics to show support to minorities combined with infrastructure spending in an attempt to recreate some sort of FDR coalition of working class people who stick with the party because of how it serves their material interests. For various reasons it seems to have failed.
It might be a question of methods. I think to most Democrats being a good person for selfless and societal reasons was part of the messaging, but were they "gentle and firm"? Seems to me that the mainstream left decided that shame and blame was more effective. They were, of course, almost completely wrong on medium- and long-term time horizons, though not the short-term one.
Shame and blame are unavoidable because progressives, like all of us, always have to reckon with the fact that some people just point blank don't agree with them sometimes. Progressives did create a powerful media machine. Maybe not the sort of grassroots one here but there was control of a significant amount of the media space directly. They did basically try to spend the credibility of all sorts of industries and institutions to push their messages.
What happens when that doesn't seem to convince conservatives? Well, once you have a media machine the temptation to shame and censor is nearly irresistible, because of the very mindset in this post: problems are a result of conservatives imposing the wrong linguistic frame so why not just...stop them imposing any frame whatsoever?
Lakoff seems to avoid the manichean view of modern progressives but he shares the same impulses: political differences are based on messaging or the wrong sort of education as opposed to deep disagreement on values or even a pragmatic judgment that progressive policies are not in one's interests.
Yet I wonder. DO we in fact have a shifted attitude toward some of these issues? Health care yes! Conservatives were very resistant to "health care is a human right" but I think that attitude is everywhere now.
Another theory is that conservatives have given up on fighting healthcare for the same reason that fiscal conservatives across the West are unable to cut the budget or stop many deeply unwise policies (e.g. the triple lock in the UK): once the government starts giving people things it's very, very hard to stop it.
It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?
It's similar to the segment of left-wingers claiming that they wouldn't kill Kirk but his dead is an outcome of his policies and behavior and/or that a lack of respect are the norms he himself lived by when others were in trouble (e.g. wrt Nancy Pelosi's husband). As I said the line is usually "he agreed with this, not me"
Doesn't work for anyone who outright says he should be killed for opposing the Civil Rights Act but most have more deniability.
In terms of scale of course it isn't similar. But then, it's hard to think of a similarly prominent media figure on the Left being killed or even coming as close as Trump. Kirk is basically as high as it goes for RW influencers. Given the use of Karmelo Anthony (that news is significantly more avoidable than Kirk or Luigi I think) I figured scale wasn't the sina qua non
By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this?
His own? He manifestly failed at his self-appointed task of reform and was criticized even within his time for his behavior. Which, even then, was necessarily norm-breaking for a republican.
@Sunshine's point is damning actually: proscription worked for Augustus because he wanted to permanently destroy the constitutional order. Sulla was trying to fix a republic and picked the tools of a tyrant and expected it to work out.
Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years. Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"?
How a Young Activist’s Murder Has Been Gleefully Distorted Online
It took only a few hours for the death of Ryan Carson, stabbed before dawn in a random assault as he waited for a bus in Brooklyn, to become an indictment of his politics so vitriolic that it threatened to overwhelm the grief. In the view of his online adversaries, Mr. Carson, a 31-year-old progressive activist, died at the hands of his own misbegotten ideology — “brainwashed” into believing he could help the poor and wayward.
The morally vacant critics on what we used to know as Twitter were not alone in attacking him and the girlfriend who witnessed his murder. Writing in The American Conservative and attempting to claim a place on the frontiers of decency, Declan Leary offered that he would not “celebrate” Mr. Carson’s death, as others were doing. Still, he expressed the belief that Mr. Carson carried partial “blame” not just for what happened to him but also for the death of “countless others killed by the chaos he defended.”
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet
It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.
Tanista
1mo ago
If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing
I mean, you can find people right now claiming that Klein is a "neoliberal" or some other sneer word instead of a leftist. The entire debate over Abundance seems tinged with this.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.
And there’s where the core of liberalism lost the plot in thinking “groups don’t have rights, only individuals do.”
This isn't even true, which is even worse. In places like Canada (also just attempted in the UK) people in the right groups get differing sentences because of their alleged group-specific troubles
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side.
It's zero sum because people understand that it's at least theoretically possible to get all you want by appealing to rights without convincing the other side. So there's less incentive to be sensible.
The activists like Chase Strangio have done far more damage than any online crazy like Gretchen Felker-Martin. You can ignore crazies.
Tanista
1mo ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war.
I disagree actually. All of those examples are just proof that we can't suspend judgment on values. They all matter a lot. To what you can say, do, to the very composition of the republic (what could be more important?).
The only question is whether the groups debating it come to some sort of compromise, one crushes the other or both sides are given enough space to live their lives in a manner congruent with their values and away from the tribe with inimical values.
Part of the problem with many of these values issues is that the last of these has been removed from the game (the internet doesn't help here) and values are often zero sum (even within the left-wing coalition some of the tension between rights claims don't seem resolvable in a way that satisfies both sides)
It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked.
Part of the problem is precisely that they were mocked. Whether they were prophets or actively brought about their worst fears, I think there's a backlash effect where people feel that attempts to keep things within some reasonable window were actively used against them by defectors on the other side. Once you get burned on "no one is saying/doing X" you become less charitable.
Tanista
1mo ago
I feel like this should be my handle at this point but: It's Just Twitter.
Remember learn to code? No? Why would you?
What sounds like innocuous career advice is, in many cases, part of targeted harassment. The phrase “learn to code” was added to Know Your Meme four days ago, where it’s described as “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.” Part of the Know Your Meme entry explains that those posting the phrase “believe those news organizations have been shitting on blue-collar workers for years.” Additionally, writer Talia Lavin posted screenshots from 4chan that suggest the “learn to code” tweets were a targeted attack by the notorious online message board. “Learn to code” is more than internet schadenfreude. It’s also the most recent rallying cry of an anti-media faction.
There was word Twitter was taking down “learn to code” tweets because they fall under the umbrella of abusive content, but a Twitter spokesperson clarified its position in an email: “It’s more nuanced than what was initially reported. Twitter is responding to a targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals—a policy that’s long been against the Twitter Rules.” Twitter also directed me to its policy on targeted harassment, which prohibits “behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior.” I also asked Twitter whether it was able to identify coordinated efforts directed at the mass of recently laid-off writers, or whether it could tell where those efforts were coming from, but the company did not respond as of publishing.
They broke any attempt to coordinate what is basically a mean-spirited joke (assuming it was coordinated in the first place - if it's anything like reddit and "brigading" there's a lot of crying wolf). No way would they allow this sort of thing. Elon not only allows it, he signal-boosts it.
YMMV on which is better.
This might be a small scale question itself but wasn't it about non-resistance to active persecution in the original text?
How did "if someone slaps you turn the other cheek to also be slapped" turn into "oh, I forgive you, but I make no promises for that judge over there or that cop I just called"?
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