There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx
And, you know, that other guy.
I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
EDIT:
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely
This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).
laxam
23hr ago
I went to the protests tonight as a legal observer because there were reports that arrests were "imminent." While I was there, the encampment organizers designated a "red" group- those who WANTED to be arrested - from a "yellow" group - those WILLING to be arrested. The distinction concerns me; there are people actively SEEKING to get arrested.
Past a certain level, there is no such thing as an organic protest. There are professional organizers somewhere in the background and they've got their tactics and strategies all worked out after a few generations of experience of this kind of thing.
laxam
2d ago
Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects
While Zionism has always had a spectrum, up until the 1990's Israel was a pretty left wing country. Early Zionists especially were almost all socialists of one variety or another. The Kibbutzim are communes!
laxam
3d ago
Also, Scots are Celts
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
laxam
3d ago
If anything, it has a lot to do with urbanization and industrialization in general.
laxam
3d ago
'Christianity' declined in America when elite institutions started getting filled up with Catholics and jews. This happened in the 1940's and by the 1960's the new 'elite' was throwing their weight around. The old WASP ideals were pushed aside. That's all there is to the story of modern America. 1,2
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
laxam
4d ago
Elite Christian culture adopted the Classical heritage before the Roman Empire even fell in the West, so the thing where British imperial administrators learned Latin and Greek and the Classics is just the same Christian tradition that sent them to listen to the softly spoken magic spell every Sunday.
laxam
4d ago
That one guy that used to be a mod is right about the fact that they are much more similar to white progressives than they are to Red Tribe whites in America or working class whites in Europe. The whites they imagine only exist in their head.
Wasn't that the original idea behind Scott's tribal classification? All of these DR people are Blue Tribe, of course they don't like or get along with actual Red Tribers.
laxam
9d ago
There has been no evidence up to even the level of the coup against the Mosaddegh government (ie. not a particularly high bar) that the CIA planned or executed any of it.
laxam
9d ago
In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania".
I have never heard of that in my life. Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state, with no one party dominating the state government for more than a term in decades (and that was a Republican trifecta) and it being close to a century since there was permanent partisan control of the sort you see in California or Massachusetts.
Overzealous bureaucracy knows no partisan bounds.
laxam
9d ago
The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?
laxam
13d ago
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing.
Someone has never run into a bunch of people from different Balkan countries online.
laxam
18d ago
You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony.
It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
laxam
21d ago
I can't find the paper right now, but I recall having read one showing that patients tend to conceal that fact from their doctors and form communities where they help each other find willing surgeons and publicize techniques for duping less willing ones into going along with it.
Isn't that the story of the online trans community in the late 2000's/early 2010's?
laxam
26d ago
I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.
laxam
30d ago
Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically.
That huge relief of visible suffering was the 'disproof' of the anti-social security argument. That is normally the way these things work: A huge and public argument goes on for quite some time on a particular topic, most often without being settled explicitly by public debate but, instead, by events. While the relation of such 'events' to the previous debate can often be quite tenuous in fact, in the perception of the public it is ultimately all that matters. It has ever been thus. Many public debates in the distant past were settled by the winner of a battle, not because might makes right, but because victory proves the favor of God/the gods. The entire rejection of the small central state/market oriented model in the United States came down to the disaster of the Great Depression, regardless of whether 'free markets' """caused""" the Depression or not.
Good information is expensive.
laxam
1mo ago
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
laxam
1mo ago
The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.
laxam
1mo ago
The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.
Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:
(g) Definitions
In this section:
(1) Controlled by a foreign adversary
The term controlled by a foreign adversary means, with respect to a covered company or other entity, that such company or other entity is—
(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;
(B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or
(C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).
(2) Covered company
(A) In general
The term covered company means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that—
(i) permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content;
(ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
(iii) enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content that can be viewed by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application; and
(iv) enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application.
(B) Exclusion
The term covered company does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.
(3) Foreign adversary controlled application
The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
(4) Foreign adversary country
The term foreign adversary country means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:
section 4872(d)(2):
(2) Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—
(A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;
(B) the People’s Republic of China;
(C) the Russian Federation; and
(D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.
If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.
The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.
laxam
1mo ago
Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.
I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.
Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).
Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.
As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.
laxam
1mo ago
Yeah, there's that, too. We are not Elves and we cannot have their life. We are Men and the fading of the world of Elves leaves us to build our own paradises.
laxam
1mo ago
There's a chapter in Anna Karenina where Levin, the lovesick landowner and sometime friend of Anna's brother, returns to his estate after trying and failing to win the heart of Kitty, a young woman who is still too caught up in the thrills of court life to take him seriously. While there, there is a scene where he assists his tenants with harvesting the grain, spending most of a day just working side by side with them. Tolstoy describes this experience like next to nothing else he describes in the whole book, lauding it in a way that almost feels utopian. You can feel Tolstoy's agrarianism shine right through.
I've never found the idea that paradise involves no work very convincing.
It's not an absolutely terrible argument when used to warn others to really attend to the possible risks they're taking. Patrick Henry had an absolutely powerful speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention against the ratification of the Constitution:
Of course, maybe you are right, because:
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