WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
This is just equivocating between different definitions of "kindness". I meant kindness as a virtue - where it is loosely synonymous with "generosity", though with different connotations; Christian, and particularly Catholic, moral philosophy would liken it to "charity", which is yet again broadly comparable though not quite synonymous. I wouldn't apply the word to people who behave in kind-seeming ways for other motives, any more than "martial valour" would apply to someone who fights out of fear of punishment, not courage or honour. But let us not quibble over words. We can say that my lot are the people who place the virtue of generosity or charity highest, if you like.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
This is a valuable comment and taught me something. But with that said, surely that's still just kicking the can down the road. We might have a few times as much uranium or oil as looking at current reserves makes it look, but we're still going to run out eventually. This lengthens the timescale on which scarcity can cause societal collapse, that's all. And I don't think "we run out of uranium in three hundred years" is terribly different as a doomsday prophecy from "we run out of uranium in two hundred years".
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
As a progressive, I would say, within Plato's framework that a political ideology is defined by the virtues it places highest, that I am guided by honouring kindness above all else. I wonder if this term is missing from his system because he was uncharitable in his view of the motives of the people he wished to criticize, or if this is a difference between his democratic men and my bunch (such as it is).
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.
I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered? No, it just proves that immorality is rampant/the material world doesn't care about what hairless apes believe to be the moral law. I find this point obvious both from an atheistic (there is no external source of morality outwith ourselves; the world isn't inherently just) and Christian (the terrestrial world is imperfect; the whole point of human life is the struggle to do right by your fellow man despite the odds) perspective.
Again, I regard healthcare as a necessary part of the the practical implementation of the right to life first and foremost, and of other rights in a secondary capacity - after all, it is difficult to describe an unaided paralytic, or indeed an unmedicated madman lost in delusions, as possessing anything that could fairly be called freedom, and either situation makes the pursuit of happiness a tricky proposition. Granted, it is not impossible to be free and happy in your own mind no matter how wretched your circumstance, but at that level of pedantry, it becomes meaningless for the State to pledge to protect these rights, since one starts to wonder what infringing on them could even look like. Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them. Broken bones, antibiotics, vaccines: yes. Therapy: it depends. Hair loss treatment: nah. (I mean, you can imagine some mentally ill person for whom, for whatever reason it would make such a difference in quality-of-life that it'd be worth it. But that would have to be vouched for by a psychiatrist and fall under psychiatric treatment.)
Still, if you think "talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it", I don't want to get hung up on a turn of phrase. "I believe giving everyone access to healthcare is the moral duty of the state"? "I believe we should institute universal healthcare if at all possible, because it's the right thing to do"? Put it how you like; I don't really see how this would make you less confused about what I'm advocating.
Oh, but by the way -
who is going to be made to do that for me?
…this seems to be refusing to take the premise of the thought experiment at its word. The perfect society is defined as one in which things like medical staff shortage are handwaved away, spherical-cows-style. I don't know if this perfect society has foolproof robot doctors, if it's got money to throw on incentivizing promising students to join the medical profession, if it has really inspiring educational programs that get doctors and nurses to work for a song and the satisfaction of helping their fellow man - whatever. Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
There is no step two in this "plan" other than just admit defeat.
"Boycott shills and only engage with those who volunteer their time and efforts for free", surely? (Hmm… Is this whole thing just an effort to lure more people to the Motte?)
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
The thing, here, is that I disagree with the framing that being trans is undesirable (in an ideal environment, anyway; obviously, in a right-wing dystopia where it gets you fired from your job and alienates you from your prejudiced family, it's less likely to come out net-positive on life satisfaction).
For most trans people I know, transitioning has been a joyous and fulfilling experience. Actual trans subreddits, Discord servers, etc. are full of trans people actively delighting in their transness, not dens of wallowing and self-pity. I think the over-medicalization of what is at heart a lifestyle choice has done the whole thing a great disservice; in my book the "oh woe, gender dysphoria is soo bad, you have to let people transition" thing was another one of those well-intended white lies from 'my side' that I cannot abide, because what they've done is muddled what should be a moral slam-dunk to anyone truly concerned with liberty by trying to hitch it to a murky question of fact. I support people's right to transition whether or not they have such a thing as medically-defined "gender dysphoria". It's not a medical question, it's a moral question about autonomy, about freedom and self-determination. I support trans people in exactly the same way that I support people's right to have plastic surgery or change their name or dye their hair or dress up as anthropomorphic dogs - and for the same reason that I will support people's rights to become all kinds of cyborgs if that sort of technology ever becomes something more than one of Elon's pies-in-the-sky.
Now, with that cleared up… I don't want to come across as if I'm totally unsympathetic to parental concerns in those cases. Of course it would hurt for your child to reject the name you gave them. I understand that. But moody teenagers, and indeed grown adults, have gone "oh my god, mom, stooop, everyone at school calls me Jay, 'Jeremiah' sucks" since the dawn of time. It didn't use to tear families apart. And sure, if your kid were to be the kind of trans who wants actual surgery and not just a change of wardrobe (remember, that's by no means everyone!), you can be concerned about the mild but real risk of health complication. But again… kids get into dangerous hobbies their parents are queasy about all the time. In my view, you shouldn't be more concerned about a daughter of yours wanting top surgery than about a child of either gender getting really into biking, or rock-climbing, or, really, any high-level competitive sport. Call me when there's a moral panic about high school football.
(Whether young children are competent to make such a big lifestyle choice is a whole other discussion, but has no bearing on whether it's okay to let them experiment with a cross-gender name if they want. We don't let nine-year-olds get into cave-diving, and by my own analogy it's sensible to heavily frown on underage gender surgery; but that's no reason to bar them from dressing up in a cool plastic helmet and exploring dark corners of the playground with a flashlight.)
But I wonder about the viability of this movement. I mean, that's what "we" used to be. "We" got defeated by "the woke movement" so...how will "Reform Progressivism" be different?
The practical argument is that, as Nelson outlined in the OP, there are a lot more sincere progressives than cancel-happy sadists. All pro-free-speech conservatives + all pro-free-speech progressives = winning coalition. My hope is that it's just one of Scott's coordination problems, and Reform Progressivism only needs to achieve escape velocity to win the teeming masses over from the witch-hunters.
The more idealistic argument is that, you know, I think I'm right. I think I am putting forward the banner of "good ends, achieved via good means"; and I am optimistic enough about human nature to hope that, so long as the idea gets out there at all, this will be naturally attractive to people who had hitherto had no choice but "good ends, achieved via evil means" or "evil ends, achieved via whatever means". (No offense.)
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Ah, this is an unexpected and welcome surprise! I will try to review this over the week-end. Thanks for letting me know.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is.
I think we were talking about different things. I was talking about moral rights - natural rights - inalienable rights. You know, the one imbued into Man by his Creator, if there is such a being (but He is, in this context, a convenient philosophical abstraction whether one materially believes in Him or not, provided you are some manner of moral realist). These are famously distinct from legal rights. So when I said that human beings had a right to healthcare, I meant that it is prima facie morally wrong to withhold it from them; that they ought to have it. What moral rights the state turns into legal rights, by pledging to proactively safeguard and guarantee them, is a very different question, and involves plenty of trade-offs and choosing the lesser evil.
I view the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happines"" as acknowledging three of these natural rights and writing them into law as a pledge on the part of the US government to protect these rights as best it can. For all the reasons you outlined, "as best it can" doesn't mean it can actually keep you alive forever, or even really guarantee that you'll only die of old age. Sure. So if you want to argue something like: yes, if the US government had infinite money and we had infinite medicine, it would have a duty to distribute that medicine to everyone, but resources are scarce, and it's just not an effective use of the limited resources to die on the hill of universal healthcare - that's an object-level conversation we can have. I'm not intractable; So - I don't oppose triage in an imperfect world. Actually, triage is probably the hardest and most important job of any government.
What I do want, however, is for everyone to be on the same page with regards to the moral truth that in an ideal society, everyone would have access to healthcare. I would like everyone to agree that this is what we're working towards in the long term, whatever the current state of affairs permits. The right-wing position I was reacting against (by which of course I mean a position that is comparatively common on the right, not universal) is the denial of that moral right to healthcare; the sentiment that healthcare is simply a luxury good. Something you or I can quite naturally desire, perhaps; but not something which adds a black mark in the book of Mankind for every day that goes by where someone is deprived of it.
I notice this is similar to one of the places the race subthread ended up, and I think it's a crux of my biggest meta-issues with the right: where the progressive position is "X is desirable, so we should do X", the right-wing will be a coalition behind the banner of "not-X" that lumps together people who think X is desirable, but impractical at present; and people who think X isn't desirable. I can never shake the sense that despite appearances, the "not-X because we can't" people's natural allies are the "yes-X"ites much moreso than the "not-X because we shouldn't" people. After all, there's only object-level uncertainty separating the "yes-X"s and the "not-X(1)"s, whereas the "not-X(1)" and "not-X(2)" seem to have much more fundamental value differences. Whenever I get into an intelligent conversation with a not-X(1)-ite like yourself, I just mourn that I can't full-throatedly collaborate with their bloc because I suspect it to be full of not-X(2)s.
If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...
It was a thought experiment, yes. I'm not particularly concerned about short-term human extinction from climate change myself - my irritation with right-wingers' tendency to hedge and obfuscate on whether it's real at all has more in common with HBD types' very understandable annoyance with progressives who try to change the subject or discredit the science, rather than bite the bullet of "yes, the science says what you think it says, but your idea of what to do about it is still bad". My position on climate change, roughly expressed, is that it is obviously real bad, and obviously a very worrying crisis even in cautious estimates of how bad it will get; but, equally obviously, that private individuals' behavior, especially in the West, is a drop in the bucket, to the extent that it is a waste of energy - pun surprisingly not intended - to guilt-trip them about their personal carbon footprint or whatever. I would like more right-wingers to say this head-on and stop with the bullshit about "well, maybe it isn't completely human-caused, who's to say". It's not the point. I'm not accusing you of that particular epistemological sin but I see it a lot, and conversely I see a lot of, to my mind, completely unwarranted "har, har, woke buzzword, brainwashed morons" sneering whenever someone acknowledges man-made climate change as A Bad, Obviously Real Thing That Is Happening, whatever policies they recommend.
But as for everything after your "but", well… insert the Winston Churchill joke about haggling and prostitution. It seems there are crises of sufficient urgency that you are willing to entertain the validity of government action funded by taxation, provided the policy looks promising. Why is the death of humanity by hypothetical runaway climate change on that list, but not the preventable deaths of thousands of private citizens for lack of affordable healthcare? And either way, haven't we already gotten rather afield from a clean position where our disagreement is not on the facts, but on what it is morally acceptable for the government to do about the facts? There seem to be several points of confusion here.
To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... …If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women
If you like.
I don't think you actually need a magic genie to prevent 99% of prison rapes. You may or may not need a kind of a crystal ball, but it's a kind we know how to make! It's not a uniquely hard problem - it is a problem that there has been very little political will to solve because a lot of people not-so-secretly want prisoners to suffer above and beyond being deprived of their liberty, and a lot more people don't really care about prisoners' welfare very much compared to other issues even if they'd marginally support improvements to their condition. I don't think it's remotely fair to compare the problem of "stop prison rape" to the problem of "stop all crime everywhere": the whole point of prison is that it is a controlled, tightly-monitored closed-system.
Yes, creating "a humane prison system" in all respects is a taller order, but rapes are the one thing that the presence or absence of trans inmates has an influence on. I would be happy with first solving the narrow problem of stopping the rapes, then allowing trans women into female prisons, then going back to the drawing board to draft a more ambitious, wholesale prison reform. And I reckon you could achieve the first two simultaneously, as two clauses of the same bill. Hell, if you wanted to be really kludgy about it, you could even set up special security measures for trans women inmates, without yet tackling the broader problem of prison rape, to guarantee that the addition of the trans women doesn't move the needle. Why not?
But also… even if you couldn't - even if it turns out that, in terms of practical implementation, the only sane way to get trans women in prison to work is ten years down the line after we complete wholesale prison reform - surely I'm allowed to state what my endgame is? When I say everyone should have guaranteed healthcare, I don't expect to snap my fingers and make it happen overnight. All sorts of things need to be thought through and organized, all sorts of sub-reforms and necessary steps introduced into law, before we get where we're going. I understand that, you understand that I understand that. I'm still allowed to say I "support universal healthcare". Why shouldn't I say, in general terms, that I "support trans women being allowed into women's prisons" even if I acknowledge, or acknowledge the possibility, that this aim can only be reached after other reforms I also want go through?
EDIT: this has no bearing on the meta argument(s) but I also remembered that there is another prong to the ethical cost-benefit analysis here, which I elided in my first message on the topic because unlike the "the state shouldn't be throwing its hands up and saying 'rapists gonna rape' in the first place" thing, it has nothing to do with my feelings on the government's right to inflict violence on its citizens. Namely: aren't trans women - commonly regarded as highly effeminate men - very likely to be raped themselves in men's prisons? Doesn't it at least seem worth investigating that, in expectation, all else being equal, putting a trans woman in a men's prison might be more likely to result in rape than putting her in a women's prison - because the trans woman in the women's prison may or may not be interested in raping women, but it is all but guaranteed that at least one man in the men's prison will be interested in raping a sissy?
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
"HBD is probably broadly correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?
You've dropped the "long-term". Obviously it would have immediate political implications, of the variety "we need to get rid of misguided disparate-impact legislation and the like". But once that paradigm has been abandoned, the word "race" should have no further impact on policy decisions. If specific metrics which happen to differ between racial groups are relevant, talk about the metrics directly. My concern is that accepting the objective reality of HBD should not entail giving the ethno-nationalists anything.
And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average. (…) They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?
Well… in the truly long term… luxury space communism? But in the shorter term, and without making any controversial predictions about future technology, I think a just society would decouple the property of "prestigious and remunerative" from "best reserved for those with a high I.Q." in how it thinks about jobs. Think of Scott's musings in The Parable of the Talents.
Regarding "prestigious", if a just society has zero-sum social status at all, it should be given to those who virtuously turn whatever talents they do possess to particularly pro-social ends - whether that's a musclebound hulk who becomes a fireman instead of a pro wrestler, or a dexterous polymath who becomes a brilliant, life-saving surgeon instead of sitting around at home speedrunning video games. (I stress that this wouldn't be some sort of Stalinist nightmare enforcing "from each according to his ability" at gunpoint - doing the prosocial thing should be incentivized, but supererogatory.) I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic wish; if anything it's almost reactionary of me. It used to be that you didn't have to be a genius to be a fulfilled, well-liked pillar-of-the-community type; it used to be the way the world worked in civilized countries, that firemen and nurses and farmers could count on the respect of their peers if they went conscientiously and honestly about the business of doing useful jobs, just as much as the doctor or the mayor. Maybe part of the problem is that our communities nowadays are too damn big… Every day I'm a little more hostile to 'big cities' as a concept.
And regarding "remunerative", if nothing else I am strongly inclined to think that a large part of the anxiety around wealth disparity is a negative desire to avoid poverty, not "greed" in the conventional sense. Hence, my preferred policies of universal healthcare, zero homelessness, a strong UBI, etc. should mitigate the sting of unequal life outcomes. I am not so naive as to think it would eliminate economic resentment completely; greed exists, jealousy exists. But would we get race riots if the difference in outcomes was "fewer blacks can afford second homes and pools" rather than "fewer blacks can afford life-saving surgery"? I think a strong welfare state makes biting the bullet of unequal economic outcomes viable in a way it isn't without one. It seems worth a try.
But if that doesn't work, if nothing else works, I will bite the bullet of "well, we need (something a lot like) communism, with wealth caps and redistribution", centuries sooner than I will bite the bullet of eugenics. What you propose horrifies me, all the moreso if it's clear that we're talking about a much broader spectrum of traits than just a linear I.Q. graph. Isn't the point of "biodiversity" that it is an inherently beautiful thing that should be preserved? I already don't think we should allow rare species of dull-as-brick newts to go extinct just because it's economically expedient; I'm sure as hell not gonna accept erasing whole human phenotypes, whole ways of seeing the world, just to make society run more smoothly. Society is meant to facilitate human flourishing, not the other way around.
Thank you in turn for this reply.
As I've now told others in this thread, my intent with this comment was not to launch into object-level debates on the progressive 'articles of faith' I listed. It's certainly not to rehash the Root Question of Libertarianism, interesting though I find it. It was specifically to hash out whether you genuinely thought extreme progressivism could be separated from wokeness, and whether you genuinely thought the latter a more pressing enemy to defeat than the former - in which case, again, I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.
That being said, wading into a few of these questions without quite diving head-first into them, I also doubt that my disagreements with most conservatives boil down to my being less of a libertarian than they are. Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.
And indeed, with regards to policy hot-takes on trans rights, my leeriness of state violence is essential to one of the "controversial status quo policy [I] endorse": i.e. I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want, if we are to have gender-segregated prisons at all. "We can't do that," you cry: "they'll rape the cis female inmates". The common riposte from trans advocates is "how dare you suggest a trans woman could be a rapist", of course, but I think that misses the point by a country mile.
No - I regard the prevalence of that objection as a scathing indictment of the entire American prison system, one which calls into question its very legitimacy as an arm of the justice system. If the State is going to commit such a direct violation of the personal freedom of its citizens as "locking them in little grey rooms for years at a time", I consider "guaranteeing that more vulnerable inmates will not be raped while in custody" to be a pretty low bar to clear before I'll even entertain the possibility that such actions are morally justifiable for the greater good of society. If female prisoners truly are so totally at the mercy of a trans inmate, then they are also at the mercy of a lesbian rapist who works out, and that is flatly unacceptable. Society should fix that. Imperatively. And once it is fixed, the objection against putting trans prisoners where they want to go dissolves.
To round back to my original point, as you can see, I hold this position very strongly, and I hold it as an extension of underlying moral principles on which it seems you can find common ground. So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.
You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive!
Well, yes. Obviously what any committed conservative will want me to do is stop being a progressive, ultimately, just as I wish for the reverse. But I was replying to NelsonRushton, whose opening post explicitly cast his position as that of one who thought we should table the regular right-vs-left fight on the object-level questions, and focus on fighting wokeness considered as a "degenerate" form of progressivism that can and should be distinguished from mere "extreme progressivism". I am not so naive as to be asking you guys to start agreeing with me on everything; I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.
As such, I don't want to get bogged down too much in arguing about the object-level beliefs in question, because whether or not you guys agree with me on there really wasn't my point. My point was "if your problem with wokeness/cancel culture really isn't reducible to disagreeing with me on these object-level points, and you hate wokeness much more than progressive beliefs in and of themselves, then perhaps we could cooperate to get rid of cancel culture, which we both dislike".
But I do want to address this:
Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.
It's hardly your fault for assuming, given it's my 'spiciest' position relative to orthodox progressives; and I suppose it's partly on me besides, for using a term with as many different competing definitions as "racism". But I am not, in fact, a blank-slatist. "Dan" in the first section of Scott's Against Murderdism describes me pretty well. When I say that I find racism abhorrent, I mean racism as a value system; not what its opponents tend to call "scientific racism".
What I find morally abhorrent is to treat thinking, feeling human beings differently because of their race; to make them feel that they are somehow lesser, less deserving of happiness or respect, because of inborn characteristics beyond their control and which constitute part of their very identity. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are statistically significant cognitive differences between ethnic groups. I don't entirely trust the existing science in its specifics, but I would still be against racism if the Bell Curve-type science was completely convincing on all questions of fact. I oppose discrimination against neurodivergence as it is, and there the whole point is that I recognize the material existence of inborn mental differences between e.g. autistics and allistics.
I believe that my fellow progressives initially started suppressing racial science because they thought it would be an easier line to argue, than to fight the trend of sloppy, amoral thinking that draws a line from "blacks may be tend to be less good at math than whites" to "therefore slavery was okay all along". "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" being as far outside the Overton window as it is for either side is at once the result of that cowardly dereliction of moral duty, and the reason it has not yet been rectified.
Me, however, I reject g-supremacism as an ethical position. Certainly I.Q./g (yes, I know they don't exactly correlate, whatever) is instrumentally useful in certain tasks, and we want to hire high-I.Q. people to be jet pilots for the same reason we want to hire strong people to be firefighters, tall people to be basketball player, and red-haired children to play Ron Weasley. But even if we boil down all dimensions of intelligence into a smart/dumb binary, I reject absolutely the idea that, all else being equal, it is "better" to be smart than dumb; that the life of a smart human is somehow more worth living, or worth preserving, than the life of a dumb human. If a linearly-I.Q.-boosting pill existed I wouldn't particularly want to take it, any more than I especially want to be ten inches taller.
(Granted it might be instrumentally better for society as a whole if there were more high-I.Q. people around. But it would also be better for society if I ate gray slop and worked ten hours a day with precisely no more breaks than required for my bodily health. However, none of this is society's business and running a government any other way is an inhuman abomination.)
And from where I'm standing, the sooner right-wingers forsake any hint of bigotry in that sense, the sooner the saner people on my side will be able to prevail and break the scientific deadlock, secure in the knowledge that the research will no longer risk being used as ammunition for a position which I find, yes, viscerally abhorrent.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Because my goals sit far left of the Overton window on many issues (e.g. queer rights, universal healthcare). I thought the post outlined that much clearly enough. For a simplified example, I'm not precisely a communist, but surely you can see how someone whose position was "we should abolish capitalism in America completely, but this should only be done through free elections within the boundaries of the Constitution after convincing a majority of the population that Marx was right about everything in an open marketplace of ideas" would be a radical.
You make a distinction between the medium and the message
To be more exact, NelsonRushton made that distinction, or in any case, affected to make it. I was questioning whether he really believed in it.
But if we define "wokeness" as the cancel-culture apparatus and associated phenomena, then it seems clear to me that they can be "disambiguated". Here I stand, living proof. The temptation of blood-soaked revolutions is one of mankind's greatest ethical pitfalls, but reducing all ideologies used by power-hungry revolutionaries to superficial excuses seems absurd. Taking the French Revolution, surely a majority of Americans would describe themselves as anti-monarchists, and that doesn't inevitably make them Robespierre's useful idiots.
My view is that any violent revolution can be hijacked by power-hungry sociopaths. This is a very good reason not to start violent revolutions, no matter how right you feel. But it is not a reason to unilaterally condemn or ignore any political or moral position that some people, at some point in history, have been tempted to start a revolution about. I should hope that things like the abolition of hereditary monarchies and the abolition of feudal serfdom are recognized by a majority of Americans today - indeed, by a majority of the developed world - as morally-justified causes. Their righteousness is precisely why they were able to generate mass popular support the nearest charismatic sociopaths found themselves motivated to redirect for their own ends. It has no bearing on the underlying question of right and wrong.
yes; I dislike both the medium and the message.
That, I never doubted. That is why you are in fact a right-winger. As a true liberal I do not begrudge you - or indeed Nelson! - the right to that opinion.
However, Nelson's rhetoric implied that he had special animus for the medium in and of itself, distinct from his dislike for progressives qua progressives. He wrote wrote of wokeness as a specific phenomenon which it was urgent to quell, while he is happy to live-and-let-live with non-'woke' progressives (who he explicitly believes needn't be "natural enemies" to conservatives "in a sane world").
The impetus of my post was as follows. If this truly represents Nelson's beliefs and priorities, then it seems to me that he could and should, for his own side's interest, enter into an alliance of convenience with principled progressives like myself in the war against runaway political-correctness/cancel-culture/"wokeness". Then we can slay the dread beast and go back to fighting each other civilly on the object-level questions of policy and morality. This is self-evidently the rational thing for both of us to do, particularly if, as Nelson also argued in the OP, most progressives aren't actually pro-"woke" but are just going along with it out of apathy and fear.
And yet - I observed - Nelson, and people like Nelson, seemingly can't stop themselves from letting their object-level disagreements with progressivism into arguments which they profess are only about the meta-level. Conclusion from this progressive: either
1- for the sake of a few incidental jabs which have no bearing on his overall argument, Nelson is stupidly discouraging us progressives from entering into an alliance that would be mutually satisfactory
or
2- he isn't really serious about this business of reserving special hatred for cancel culture and being willing to play fair with progressives who play fair in return.
If it's #1, people like Nelson should reconsider their argumentative strategy; if it's #2, they should stop lying. It's wrong. And serves no purpose in a place like the Motte where they would face no backlash for stating that they just hate progressivism itself, as you have done.
It seems that you consider fighting radical progressive ideas ("the message") to be as high a priority as fighting cancel culture etc. ("the medium"), meaning you have no incentive to enter into an alliance with a Reform Progressive. If you admit as much then I don't have any intellectual disagreement with you on how you're conducting yourself - only the ordinary object-level disagreements about the nature of good and evil and all those superficial little details.
Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)
Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.
But that brings me to my more politically-relevant point, which is that I don't recognize a difference between the right to life and the right to healthcare; one is the implementation of the other.
There is, of course, an enduring moral question of action-vs-inaction. Granting that I have a moral obligation not to drown my fellow man, do I also have an obligation to save him from accidental drowning if I happen to be passing by? But I think the "good Samaritan" question doesn't apply in the case of the State which has actively pledged to proactively protect its citizens' lives. I, personally, may or may not have a duty to intervene to save a random stranger from drowning; but then, I am not generally regarded as having a moral obligation to save random strangers from being mugged at gunpoint, either. The State has pledged to safeguard my life, and already takes measures to proactively save me from being shot or battered or strangled. In my book, that should extend to proactively saving me from disease, starvation, and exposure.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
You remember correctly, but it was a matter of a few hours and visibly an effect of poor drafting, not a deliberate attempt to give him future immunity. The span of time was negligible. (I suppose this doesn't disprove the theory that the mistake was deliberate, and intended as a benign-looking battering ram through which to set a precedent for genuine future immunity. But I'm loath to ascribe to machiavellian malice what can be explained by incompetence.)
As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.
You write:
Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism.
My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?
The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.
A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.
So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.
But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.
Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.
If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.
And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.
Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
Certainly I've encountered it. I'm sure you've also encountered army-fetishists who aren't particularly brave or self-sacrificing when push comes to shove, priests who aren't very godly, etc. etc. I don't regard it as an argument against any position or movement or value to point out that a great number, perhaps even a plurality or majority, of the people who profess to support it fall short of the ideal. Humans are flawed, messy, unreliable creatures.
And so am I - but nevertheless I choose to be a humanist in the truest sense; to extend kindness/etc. to the whole sorry lot of us, including myself. The ostensibly-'unkind' included. I think too many people claim to want to be kind, but take the easy road and revoke kindness-privileges to those who they think fall egregiously short of the principle themselves. This may or may not be sound game-theory when it comes to tolerance, the paradox of which is of course is what they'll cite if pressed; but it's bad moral philosophy when it comes to kindness, and too many of my fellow progressives have allowed themselves to confuse the two because it makes the whole ethos a good deal easier to practice… at the cost of making it a lot hollower in effect.
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