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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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And Karl Marx was an bourgeois wannabe who lived on handouts from his parents and Engels and never worked a day of real labour in his life. And neither was he able to fully articulate what the ideal communist state would look like.

Just because their personal lives don't perfectly reflect their stated ideological preferences doesn't mean their preferences aren't real or don't resonate with a lot of people.

Karl Marx had the advantage of positioning his potential society as an inherent outcome of impersonal forces. He believed it would be a good society, but the inherent virtue of the average prole had nothing to do with it. To Marx - and to Marxists I've known - his own personal virtue or even his own personal dedication to labouring had nothing to do with the truth-value of his ideology because Marxism (qua Marx, not, uh, the new kind) doesn't demand personal virtue as a prerequisite to its outcomes.

Modern conservatives often do, which is why the "homophobic Republican politician fucks men" headline is so particularly juicy.

I think there's a difficulty to preaching "we should do X" and then not doing X, whether it's conservatives living in what they should consider sin or socialists in mansions. It's why I find it difficult to take either ideology seriously much of the time.

Marx may have advocated a proletarian revolution and "dictatorship" but he didn't believe that a working class existence in a capitalist state was particularly desirable. It seems consistent with his ideology that he would want to avoid it.

You say this as if it were an argument in support of the, you know, those ideological preferences.

No, I'm saying that simply pointing out that people aren't the perfect paragons of the ideology they support isn't actually a rebuttal of that ideology or their arguments. It's the textbook definition of ad hominem.

Perhaps it is exactly because these 'New Right' live in a modern liberal society and have modern liberal lives they can articulate their dissatifaction with it. Someone like Meloni would probably agree that raising a child as a single mother is not ideal despite being one herself, and probably supports (and does to my knowledge) support traditional social institutions that would make it less common.

Why do you think that ad hominem is necessarily a fallacy?

Suppose you meet a guy at a party who explains in detail why modern plumbing sucks and how to improve on it vastly. You're intrigued and ask how his elegant mutations and cunning annihilations worked out in practice--only to discover that not only he never tried them ever, but also never did any plumbing at all, modern or otherwise. Is it wrong to disregard his special plan for your toilet with extreme prejudice? I don't think so, because there are vastly more completely deranged plans than actually good ones, one can't end up with a good one without actually trying them in the real world, a lot, and it's not worth your time to debunk a theory that was never put into practice.

Similarly, OK, we can accept it when someone says "it sucks" about a situation they are not themselves necessarily in, or in but having never experienced something different. Marx complaining about labor conditions, a single mother complaining about single motherhood, yeah sure. But when they start proposing their fixes that they have no experience living with whatsoever, then it's entirely valid to ad hominem them.

I think what 2rafa was saying was most popular rightists don’t have a vision for the future of the world. Whether or not people without vision are hypocritical or can change the world it is a shame no public figure seems to have a beautiful vision for everyone’s future.