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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28927 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?

I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.

And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.

Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.

Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)

Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here

You might find this interesting - if not for the purpose of developing effective propaganda, then at least for your own edification. It has a bit of a bibliography for further reading.

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism:

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies? Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

...And if you don't agree with the above, would you agree that hypothetically, if the above were the reality of the situation, it would be a case of communists converting to "liberalism", only for their "liberalism" to recapitulate communism?

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies?

I think that Antifa would qualify as such, yes. My impression is that lately they've been less active in terms of large public actions than they were during the height of the Trump years, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention as much.

Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Yes.

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

Generally, I'm in a position where I want to believe in the capacity of cultural production and academic thought to have impacts outside of their own provincial spheres, but I don't know if the evidence actually supports such a claim.

The author of the linked post may be suffering from a bit of myopia. He gives a historical account of certain trends within analytic philosophy departments. But you can certainly still find people in non-analytic philosophy departments, people in non-philosophy departments (English, sociology, the menagerie of "Studies", etc), and people outside of academic altogether, who call themselves Marxists. (Of course, the authenticity and seriousness of such commitments are always open to questioning.)

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Then where did she and the infrastructure supporting and defending her come from? IIRC, she's a lifelong academic.

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

I'd agree that it's a tricky business, but it seems to me there's no way to avoid engaging with that business. Further, it seems to me that we've been engaging in that business routinely more or less forever. I engage in that business every time I consider an argument about strutural racism or sexism or colonialism or any of the other basic arguments of the progressive worldview. I reject the progressive arguments not because the question is too nebulous to draw a conclusion, but because I examine the evidence and draw conclusions. It seems to me that the sort of uncertianty you describe seems to pop up when the sort of critique that is usually applied by progressives is instead turned on them, and it seems to me that it pops up even when those applying this critique to progressivism have much, much better evidence to support their critique than the progressives generally do.

For an example, it is routine in our society to attribute violent crime rates to socio-economic factors, and to claim that these violent crime rates can be increased or decreased by various policy interventions. Well, we just witnessed an extremely powerful cluster of policy interventions, and we can observe that it was immediately followed by the largest change in violent crime rates ever rigorously observed. And yet when I suggest a causative linkage, the same people who have spent years telling me that I should take the impact of socio-economic factors on the crime rate more seriously suddenly start claiming that the whole issue is an impenetrable fog, and real knowledge is simply impossible.

Likewise in this case, I observe that there's a long and quite sordid history of involvement in communist activism on the part of Academia, that academia seems to be ground-zero for the current crop of communist thugs, and that academia takes public steps to organize and defend their thuggery. I'm not sure where the uncertainty is coming from, or how we might reduce it. Would an analysis of association between Antifa and Academia be sufficient?

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