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Is liberalism dying?
I see frequently brought up on this forum that Mitt Romney was a perfectly respectable Mormon conservative that was unjustly torn apart by the Left. In response to this, the Right elected a political outsider that is frequently brazenly offensive and antagonistic to the Left, as well as many (most?) establishment institutions. I am seeing the idea "this is a good thing, because if the Left are our enemies and won't budge from their positions that are explicitly against us, we need to treat them as such", probably expressed in other words.
This frightens me, as it seems to be a failure of liberalism, in this country and potentially other Western liberal democratic countries. Similar to the fate of this forum, where civil discussion was tried and then found to be mostly useless, leading to the expulsion of the forum to an offsite and the quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout, the political discourse has devolved into radicals that bitterly resist the other side. Moderates like Trace seem to be rare among the politically engaged, leaving types like Trump and AOC. They fight over a huge pool of people who don't really care much about politics and vote based on the vibe at the moment, who are fed rhetoric that is created by increasingly frustrated think-tanks and other political thinkers. Compromise seems to not be something talked about anymore, and instead, liberalism has been relegated to simply voting for your side and against the other side. To me, this is pretty clearly unsustainable, since the two sides seem to have a coin flip of winning each election and then upon winning, proceed to dismantle everything the previous side did.
We see this in a number of other Western liberal democratic countries. Germany and France both had a collapse of their governments recently due to an unwillingness between the parties to work together and make compromises. Similar states that seem to be on the brink of exhaustion include South Korea and Canada, though I'm told things are not nearly as divisive in Japan. China, though having its own set of problems, seems to not have issues with political division stemming from liberalism, since it's not liberal at all.
I am seeing these happenings and becoming increasingly convinced that liberalism is on its way out. Progressivism and the dissident right both seem to be totally opposed to the principles. This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you? If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?
Yes.
You could call those examples trite, and you'd be right. You can make the argument that these are sincere, and I'd have trouble taking you seriously. But they're examples I 'picked' in the sense that I can stumble across them opening my normal web feeds and leaf through a week or two of news and social circles, and I'm selecting them only in the sense that they have a shared theme and I won't dox myself. My posting history has a long array of near-monthly examples, not just of randos, but of things in fields I care about.
I've had software collaborators suddenly wax happily about the time they decked Brendan Eich; the lead dev for a game mod framework I've spent almost a decade around got canned so hard from the project that at least one collaborator got an ultimatum from their job; my desktop environment's lead dev can't submit issues or talk on forum threads for several core libraries. The tumblr ratsphere example of A Good Feminist decided that her book about dismissing perspectives of other people was actually about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups"; the person who introduced Serano as such an example had their significant other drop private messages from Scott into the New York Times doxxing spree.
The STEM outreach group I volunteer for keeps having flareups and schisms because of increasingly tiny culture war stuff, yada yada. A college I've run events for is in the news for overtly discriminating against people who disagree with their politics, and it's only in the news because there's a hilarious amount of documentation, and that's still vague enough that without a direct link it could be in literally any state in the country.
It's not like it's this is just a progressive thing. There's no shortage of conservative overreach already, and I expect that the list is going to get much longer faster than I could write it out.
I'd love it if there were a lot more life in liberalism, or the Peace of Westphalia, or whatever you want to call it. As I've said many times, and will say again, we're all ultimately minorities of one, and I'm there a lot sooner than the average person. It's the reason I've even tried to continue conversations with Trace, after it all, or Amadan here.
But the Litany of Grendlin matters. If it's dead, it's not a bad thing to know that it's dead.
If you seek to change the world, change your mind. And then seek to persuade other people, having seen what it took.
These aren't the only ways to get people to follow your interests! That's the problem! Progressives and (especially!) the extremes of the left and right can make a very persuasive argument that many of the biggest political successes of the progressive movement in the last two decades have revolved around non-persuasive approaches, ranging from social shaming to blocking discussion to cancellation to lawfare to literally punching out
everybody that disagrees with themnazis. Non-extremists can do it.I don't think enough conservatives want to persuade. I don't think many, if any, progressives do. I'm not even sure many centrists do.
That's a part of what makes the examples here frustrating, and why I'm linking past discussions with TW where I'm trying to come up with a response to his last twitter discussion that isn't linking to past discussions. It's not moderation that's core to liberalism. It's at least imaginable to have a world where people had very strong and very strongly disagreeing positions, but where we hash that out by words and, where hashing that out either doesn't work or takes a long time to settle, we just live with that.
It doesn't even have to be that libertarian! (although that's easier to imagine).
But we don't. Even among actual moderates.
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Take it from the old liberal JS Mill:
Now, hes explaining this in terms of nationality, but I think its clear that this is far from the only reason why people may fail to form a united public opinion - and indeed, the modern US version is mostly not based on it. But the point is that this idea of liberalism and democracy as a dispute resolution mechanism is an extremely novel idea that even liberals and democrats would have told you wont work almost universally until 1900, and mostly until WW2. It was clear that such a government must express a common national spirit. Political competition that is not grounded in such is not campaigning, it is Realist pseudo-international relations, because you have indeed nothing to lose but your chains in going there.
We have started to claim it is unnecessary, and then slowly the rules-lawyers have nudged us to stop maintaining it, and the US is now beginning to see the effects of this.
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It does seem to be in dire straights doesn't it? Fortunately it has survived worse before and it will survive this. It survived the beginning of the 20th century for starters, when everyone knew the old political philosophies were dead and being replaced by glorious and vastly superior philosophies like communism and fascism. I think it can survive this ladies reboot (like it's worth watching without the trench warfare or pacific campaign). The thing you have to remember about liberalism is that it is a meta-political system designed to allow a bunch of people with competing political philosophies to unite, so even if it does go away for a bit, it will be back the instant some of the fascists realise they lack the numbers to crush the communists underfoot and vice versa.
I think the biggest problem with our current conception of liberalism is that most people aren't detached enough to be able to adhere to it. They saw liberalism as their team, and because it lacked anything like a defined aesthetic or culture beyond "whatever liberals nearby are doing right now" + "a sense of superiority and being the adult in the room" they decided whatever they did was liberalism as long as they trust the experts and cargo culted their way to (and were sabotaged into) the priestly monstrosity we have been suffering under. That's dying now, and good riddance. But liberalism as it existed outside of the last 20 years is going to be fine I think.
That said, liberalism is one of those institutional facts like democracy or Christmas that grow in strength through the public's acceptance of them, and the cargo cult version has done a lot of damage to the brand, so unless Trump and co aggressively retake it (which they might) it might disappear for a while. It's probably a good idea really, it gets it away from the stigma of the corrupted version.
This next paragraph I wrote first and then I rewrote it in a more motte friendly format, which helped it develop in a different direction, particularly something that I don't remember seeing anyone else in this thread express but when I was finished I reread this bit and realised I'd not hit the point I was originally aiming for, but I currently only have use of one arm and am full of drugs so consider it something like a Tldr that doesn't save any time or accurately represent the original - The shit currently on its way out was never liberalism, which is why people like me have had to call ourselves silly shit like true liberal or lockean liberal. For the past three decades we watched our ideology get turned into a fucking minstrel show complete with hambone and grease paint. Am I worried about liberalism now? No. Quiet or loud, I for one am happy to wait until the techno-reactionaries, gay space communists, block chain minarchists, influencer syndicalists and Keynesian necromancers of the future decide they can behave like adults and compromise a little to beat the other guys into submission.
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No, I don’t think liberalism is dying. I think the reverse is true; the population of conservatives is ever-shrinking like that meme of two ants in the middle of water.
I can’t pull up my non-anecdotal evidence at the moment, but I can use my own anecdote in my family. My entire family, from my parents to the great grandparents, is blood-red socially-conservative MAGA Republican, and I am the only progressive blue blood Democrat (the story of how that happened is tragically boring). My entire family is also stupid. I can not think of a single person that has demonstrated emotional intelligence more developed than a fifth-grader (and therefore virtually every member is suffering from depression) and I can think of the numerous amount of objectively stupid decisions (money purchases, medical needs, personal safety) that make me marvel at how having a lot of money can insulate a man from his own misery.
Anyway, my Republican family members around my age have 1-2 children, but they’re close to poverty due to having a one-income household since the mothers have no careers and are supported by their wealthy parents. Additionally, it is seriously possible their children will have early deaths due to medical negligence (it already happened to one, actually, so it’s natural to assume it will happen again). While I might not have as many children now, I believe the odds of them being intelligent enough to participate in the local, national and global scale are far higher than my familial counterparts if nothing more than I am less likely to leave my children unattended in dangerous situations because I will be smart enough to recognize them. A smart alive Democrat is worth a dozen stupid dead Republicans as I say with cheek.
My family is convicted that I did not come to my beliefs on my own and so are desperate to find the culprit and stop them so that I’ll metaphorically “come back home”. The Republican party gives them an answer; the gays, the trans, the liberals, the colleges, the porn, the atheists and the scientists all duped me into it, and when Trump comes and undoes it all everything will go back to normal and I’ll want to spend holidays with them. I believe it will be a genuine tragedy when Trump’s presidency is over and my family is faced with the terror that is my absence.
Therefore I believe, with my anecdotal evidence, that the same situation is being replayed all across the country in families just like mine. I believe the illusion of dying liberalism is actually the slow death rattle of conservatism. The wheel of progress is slow but ever-grinding, as they-who-is-I say.
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Let me ask you this. What do you think is the bedrock of liberalism? My ability to listen to you AND take your opinion seriously. The problem that appears as the tip of the iceberg clearly is that the various sides are so polarized they seem unable to cooperate. I am letting you speak (probably) , I just can't discuss with you and reach a consensus (take your opinion seriously).The problem is that the act of discussing and reaching a consensus is impossible if I am viscerally convinced I am right. This is going to sound simplistic but let's start from there. How can i be convinced to discuss if I know I am right? Especially if it's clear to me that you are my ideological enemy. Straight up the fault lies on the internet and the massive increase in propaganda and opinion-building that is happening through social media. A constant stream of info curated to your already held opinions , no matter how fanatic , and you have nazi levels of propaganda 24/7 in your screen.
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It's been a dead doctrine for a while. To the dismay of many a Liberal including myself. You either move on and embrace post-liberal means of maintaining what you value in Liberalism (for me it's natural rights, for others it's equality under the law, etc), or you go insane (like James Lindsay).
But the foundations of the ideology are now too rotten to support any serious political movement. Even Trump's coalition (the most classical liberal looking movement we have today ironically) is made up of mostly people who don't give a rat's ass about liberalism qua liberalism. The limitations of treating everyone like Robinson Crusoe are now all to apparent.
Most things that claim themselves liberal today have gone through this commonly remaked on process where taking an ideology to its logical conclusions inverts it. Neoliberalism is a quasi-feudal oligarchy that discards constitutions at will, all in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" not the ideas, but the words.
What sort of Liberal civilization would let government arbitrarily lock up its population for years, censor the press and the public square, and attempt to force people to take medical actions against their will? If Covid didn't shatter the illusion, it's because it was shattered already. The story the West tells itself about it's legitimacy rings hollow, which is why its ruling class is going to have to change the story or face counter-elites.
Liberalism indeed is in dire straights. The continental liberalism in tradition of Rousseau was proven to be easy target for subversion by progressive/woke or even worse leftist thought. Hell, look at what happened during the latest convention selecting presidential candidate of libertarian party in USA. The classical liberal outlook was basically frozen in time with latest true champion being John Stuart Mill. It is seriously outdated and did not update its concept to many modern challenges for example what to do about the digital revolution: are your personal data your private property in the old term? What to do about monopolies providing goods and services via subscription models accompanied with uncomprehensive sets of user agreements?
Nevertheless I do have sympathy for James Lindsay, he at least acknowledges all these problems.
So do I but he does not provide solutions. His debates with Carl Benjamin demonstrate to me an impasse in his ideological position. The latter is actively trying to make up something that would uphold Liberalism's best (in his conception). But Lindsay is stuck, and his only move seems to be lashing out in a frankly completely futile manner against people who have learned not to be kowtowed by such methods. People who are close to him even.
Sectarianism is political suicide.
This is a very good point. The naive optimism of 90s libertarians prevented them from formulating a true social project because they believed that connecting people and liberating information would suffice to create utopia. Yet another poisoned fruit of Rousseau, I might add.
Yet, there is space to create something like this now. Technocapitalist interests would be willing to adopt something like this, and the tools to introduce private property in cyberspace are now real. Balaji's project may very well be called a new Liberalism. But whether that will pan out remains to be seen, and the philosophical work to justify such a vision remains lacking, or libertarian rather than liberal.
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I suppose that depends on how you define of "liberalism". For my part I do not think that "liberalism" is dying so much as it is down in the 4th quarter and making what may be its final goal-line stand. Trump and his cabinet (Rubio, Hegseth, Gabbard, Vance, Et Al) seem to be the last defenders of the older, more vigorous variety, of Liberalism championed by historical figures like Adam Smith, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King and exemplified by fictional characters like Steve Rogers and James T. Kirk remaining in the public sphere. Whether they will succeed in keeping the play-off hopes of old-fashioned liberalism alive remains to be seen.
However, if you define "liberalism" as an outward appearance of politeness accompanied by deference towards "experts", "journalists", and other representatives of the priestly caste, I think I have to agree with @Tophattingson below; "liberalism" isn't dying, it is dead. COVID, or more accurately, the priestly caste's response to COVID, killed it. The Priests broke the terms of service and are now they are faced with a war of all against all.
Personally, I'm rooting for the goal-line stand and late game comeback
To expand on this, if you defined "liberalism" as a general agreement as that, it never existed outside of DC. No one (simplistically) ever won an election running on being the avatar of the experts and the neoliberal establishment.
I wouldn't personally root for a comeback of these folks who want all sorts of foreign adventurism and welfare + chaos at home. Instead I'd advocate for a new class of actual liberals to emerge. People that actually hold to the principles of Smith and Washington. A strong hand at the rudder, none of this chaos run amok at home, overseas we kill people who are bad, and most importantly, tears and people suffering the consequences of their own actions are not persuasive arguments in any context. A murderer who is upset he is on death row is ignored, an unemployed person without food is ignored, a country whos crop failed because they are too stupid to understand crop rotation is ignore, a person who can't build a malaria net is ignored.
That is liberalism.
That's how illiberal movements gain adherents; if someone is suffering and liberals tell him, "It's your own fault; you don't deserve any help; but we have the inalienable right to have you go off and die somewhere it won't inconvenience us", while communists/fascists/wokists tell him "You deserve better; it's the bourgeoisie's/minorities'/white males' fault, join us and you'll have a better life", what do you think he will do?
If you seek to build liberalism that will last, you need Liberalism With A Human Face, even if that means less-than-absolute property rights.
This is just an argument against combating evil at all. "But what about the backlash!?" Norm's joke about the Dirty bomb and the blowback against muslims, just applied universally. It is political hostage taking by the worst actors.
I happen to believe that leaving someone to starve or die of malaria while someone else can afford a yacht that launches a smaller yacht is evil; requiring people to contribute part of their wealth to the common good isn't evil.
Right, but then somebody else says, perfectly reasonably, "Hang on, I don't have a yacht and my life isn't much better than Slobby McSlobface over there. Why am I working nine hours a day to pay to alleviate his suffering when nobody cares about mine?" Expansion of welfare is basically inevitable as long as there are no bright red lines to prevent it.
It's also not the common good you're contributing to, because it's not something you share in. By the time you're 30 years old it's basically clear what strata of life you're going to fall into, and people get tetchy about being forced to pay insurance against Rawlsian risks that don't realistically apply to them.
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I disagree.
A functional, formalized, rule-based society requires writing some people off. Every society that has ever existed or will ever exist does this. The only question is who those people will be.
Keeping your society functional requires minimizing the number of people being written off, and writing them off for good reasons. This requires less-than-absolute property rights, but less-than-absolute property rights doesn't actually obviate the need for the write-offs. Losing sight of this tends to devolve down to "property-rights-in-theory", at best, and then everyone is worse off.
They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
The value to a society of rights to property lie not in how expansive they are, but in how consistent they are.
Imagine a village with 100 rich people, each of whom makes one-tenth what it would cost to feed the poor of their village/the neighbouring village.
There is a difference between telling all 100 "We need 10% of your wealth" versus letting ninety of them keep everything they have 'earned' while telling the other ten "We're taking everything you have because we don't like your face/you married the woman I fancied/your business competes with mine/you told everyone about the skeletons in our closet/&c., &c., &c."
Yes, exactly.
People make choices. Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made. When such choices are made, the people who made them sometimes need to be written off in any one of a number of ways. Sometimes this involves shaming or shunning. Sometimes it means imprisonment, exile or execution. We can wrangle over which choices require which responses, but the simple fact is that not all people are good, and not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities. I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin, and that many of the ends this system is supposed to support are never achieved.
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
Doesn't excuse us from doing our damnedest.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
In a society several orders of magnitude wealthier than today's OECD nations, people might very well be entitled to things which cannot be bought today at any price.
I am not clear on what it would mean for humans to have terminal value. I am very comfortable saying that other humans are not merely a means to my preferred ends, which is what I would assume you mean by "merely instrumental", but they are also pretty clearly not an end in and of themselves, which is what I would assume you mean by "terminal".
I would say that our common humanity imposes upon us both significant rights and significant obligations. I am not sure you and I are anywhere near agreement of what those rights and obligations actually are. Certainly they do not override all other concerns.
The treatment other human beings deserve from me ranges from tender affection to swift, merciless death. That is a pretty wide range, and you don't seem to recognize a fair portion of it.
And sometimes they are somewhat deserved. And sometimes they are entirely deserved.
I'm a big fan, but I notice that you picked something where the harm was entirely separated from the choice made; there was no germ theory of disease, people knew that cities were plague-ridden but they had no idea what the cause was or how to stop it, nor which actions helped or made it worse beyond "don't go to cities".
Now swap cholera for methamphetamines, and explain to me what the equivalent of the Sewer is supposed to be. My understanding is that there isn't actually a sewer equivalent; a lot of people who get addicted to narcotics cannot be "cured" of their narcotics addiction in any sort of reliable way; if you have data to the contrary I'd love to see it. And so it goes with many, many other similar choices. You are speaking as though you have a solution to these problems, as though effort expended on these problems translates into improved outcomes. At this late date, my assessment is that such claims involve willful deception, of the self and often of others.
"Trying" is not an exciting new strategy you thought up in a stroke of genius five minutes ago. We have been "trying" on some issues for half a century, others for multiple centuries, others for millennia. Any claim that we should continue trying needs to engage with the extant results of previous efforts, or it should be discarded out of hand as fundamental irresponsibility.
No, I don't believe it does. Human wants expand without limit. Human needs are unchanged over millennia. You can disagree if you like, but neither I nor others are obligated to subscribe to your bespoke morality.
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I'd go one step further and say that some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their parents' bad actions, and we still need to write those people off.
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The last man to win an election that way in America did so in 2020. Granted, the country was gripped in what can only be reasonably described as mass hysteria.
Joe Biden ran as a folksy old man who would govern in folksy old ways, and on the idea that the media would stop yelling at people so much. In no way was any of his campaign about technocrats. Was that fact obvious to those who were engaged? I think so, but it wasn't the marketing at all.
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Did he really win though? or did the experts and the neoliberal establishment use the disruption and mass hysteria of COVID + BLM as cover to put a puppet on the throne?
Both. The demos still voted that puppet in.
Let's agree to disagree.
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Yes liberalism is dying and for reasons that won’t come as a shock to anyone who has spent a good deal of time here.
There are certain principles of liberalism that are fraught with tension with realities on the ground. Specifically, liberals believe in a psychic unity of man, that all human beings are tabula rasas upon which magic dirt renders them their behaviour and social-economic functioning. This, paired with the idea that whites are inherently guilty and owe a debt to BIPOC that can never, ever be repaid, borders are therefore deemed hindrances and oppressive. Unlimited migration is the inevitable conclusion of the above, and since Caplan-esque Dubai policies are anathema to liberals, we get utility monster sub groups that are net-tax negative, coming in and bleeding the liberal welfare state dry (as an aside, it still amazes me that people think immigration is a solution to social security pension problems. It’s like throwing gasoline on the fire!). Only those deemed “far right” seem capable of the basic solution of enforcing borders and deportations, with the notable exception of Denmark, which may be the only way liberalism survives.
(What do you mottezins think? Is it possible that we all follow the danish model of strict outgrouping of foreigners? Or will that remain taboo among the centrists and liberals?)
I also see HBD as basically a time bomb waiting to explode. The advances in population genetics and cognitive neuroscience are going forward at an astounding rate. Everyone here already knows what I mean, and it’s only a matter of time before data and research seeps its way further into public consciousness, which it definitely can do faster now that right wingers are winning the war for social media platforms. We have accounts like cremiux and I/O basically churning out nonstop data supporting HBD at a rapid clip to an audience of millions, something previously completely unthinkable. All that remains is for the public to “get woke” to the IQ question, and it’s a matter of when, not if, that will happen. Maybe one way out is a Gattaca-style future only with publicly available embryo dna engineering for IQ.
I am a liberal and I don't believe in tabula rasa theories, magic dirt, or white guiltiness. Liberalism is completely compatible with HBD.
Yes and I appreciate its possible to harmonize these ideas if you’re a smart enough individual, but it’s not possible for the general public or a majority of liberals
Maybe, but that isn't because there is something essentially definitional about liberalism that makes it so. 100 years ago the average liberal probably would have taken HBD for granted.
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Of course being the sort of person who would use embryonic gene editing is strongly anti correlated with fertility. We’re stuck with MK I humans.
The sort of person who would be the trailblazer for gene editing, maybe. And even they might be quicker to make the jump once we have artificial wombs too.
Once gene editing is easy enough to hit the mainstream, I don't doubt it will. Example: secular normies in USA circumsize their boys all the time even though this custom is mostly limited to the religious communities outside USA to my knowledge. If such an invasive thing could be popularized by a single humble cereal company owner (as the legend goes), imagine something that actually brings your kid up to the level of the Joneses.
What fertility influencing technology hasn’t reduced birthrates?
And circumcision was a public health campaign pushed by the government on the theory that it would stop STD’s.
What fertility influencing technology wasn't birth control in one way or the other?
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The sort of person who's looking forward to using embryonic gene editing is strongly anti-correlated with fertility, but that's true of any interest in future technology. Once it's a staid, established technology, or even just a decently-well-tested technology, I'd expect the correlation to shrink and then vanish. Compare interest in AI twenty years ago (serious discussion among meganerds, plus thematic window-dressing in scifi entertainment) to today (OpenAI just passed 300 million weekly active users).
No, gene editing is a different kind of technology because it adds an extra step to the process of reproduction. The basic thought process behind high fertility is ‘sex is fun and babies are cute’. Adding further considerations, extra steps, has never done anything good for the fertility rate.
Your gattaca future is a South Korean future- TFR of .7 with mandatory investment in high status striver tomfoolery. Even in the movie it was implied this was the case- the borrowed ladder character was a failure because he was only an Olympic silver medalist, not gold.
You want more babies people have to be ok with mediocrity because most people are mediocre by definition. You can’t have a society composed entirely of the top 10% or top 1% or whatever- it’s utterly meaningless without the other 90 or 99 percent.
A 100 IQ Westerner is both perfectly mediocre and within the top ~10% of Third World cognitive ability; raising the baseline is a worthwhile goal in of itself. That said, you have a point re. extra steps: the question is whether independent fertility-increasing measures can offset the extra cost/inconvenience.
What independent fertility-increasing measures have ever worked, short of transitioning to a right-wing authoritarian regime with a state ideology that women belong in the home? Because that one's not in the cards.
AFAIK, all we really know is that authoritarian measures (kinda) work, very high religiosity works (almost too well) and just paying people to have kids doesn't (or only has marginal effect). The possibility space has barely been explored in the past 100 years; perhaps more moderate cultural nudges will suffice. (Of course, if you don't wan't merely "moderate" cultural change, this argument is moot.)
Besides, the role of woman as exclusive homemaker was adapted to a very different environment than the post-industrial age, back when being a homemaker entailed responsibilities other than "operate the washing/cleaning/cooking machine" and "make sure the kids don't kill themselves". Women have it too easy for their own good, and good times make weak(er) (wo)men.
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Inconceivable! I learned about HBD reading the wikipedia article on intelligence fifteen years ago.
Wikipedia has changed a lot since then
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Hardly surprising. Fifteen years ago Wikipedia was a lot less censored or redacted to fit an ideological line.
Liberalism is just the sum of its parts. One such part is freedom of speech. Censoring HBD is illiberal, and any ‘time bomb’ that results from censoring HBD should be laid at illiberalism’s feet. Illiberalism is the easy choice that never works out.
Sure, then let's end this charade and declare Liberalism dead already, because it seems we have about three principled liberals in the world, seven zillion illiberals wearing liberalism for a skin-suit.
No matter how unpopular it gets – and it was never that popular to begin with– liberalism will remain the best solution to organize human society, so I don’t know what it means for it to be ‘declared dead’. Critiques of liberalism on this forum are rarely specific and grounded in alternatives. Rather liberalism is pitted against an impossibly high standard. Often the failures of its enemies are assigned to it (HBD censorship).
How do you know that, if we don't currently have it?
It means we're not currently living under a liberal regime, and there's maybe a handful of liberals alive on Earth.
I disagree. Most criticism here are very specific, I can grant there's something to be said about putting forward alternatives, but if you're going to to say that the examples of it's failures were falsely attributed to it, you're essentially saying "true liberalism has never been tried", and therefore are just as empty-handed.
I don't see where anyone has done this.
We're not living in a perfectly liberal regime, but our regime is about as close to liberalism as humanity has ever gotten so far. I can see that our semi-liberal regime is better than any illiberal regime when it comes to most things that I value. Which, of course, does not mean that making the regime even more liberal would necessarily make things even better! It might not. But it does show that at least semi-liberalism is, to me, better than the known alternatives.
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See that’s what I’m talking about impossibly high standards, it’s not one or zero, you can be more or less liberal. And OP thinks liberalism failed because... people voted for less centrist candidates?
Freedom of speech is a liberal policy. You can't just point to a relative lack of freedom of speech to do the 'liberalism fails yet again!' schtick.
This is also not liberalism.
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A utility monster is an entity that gets disproportionately large gains from the same allocation of resources, as compared to a 'normal' person. They also are usually considered far harder to satiate, such that from most utilitarian perspectives, the correct thing to do is to keep dumping almost all of your resources on them indefinitely, and even if others are starved, helping the monster is still more net utils. In other words, if you give a normal person $500, they're happy, $5000, happier, and so on but with clear diminishing returns and an asymptote (Bill Gates probably would be just as happy to make another billion as another ten billion), but a utility monster might just keep getting happier indefinitely and outcompete everyone else in terms of $/util.
While the subgroups you're presumably discussing are net negative in terms of taxes, they're not utility monsters. Maybe from the perspective of someone who approves of people using their welfare payments on heroin, but otherwise, I fail to see why they would benefit more than any other group at the same degree of poverty.
My interpretation of this and most uses of "utility monster" in this context is that these are people that certain people - "liberals" in the above comment - demand we treat like a utility monster. I.e. there is no circumstance in which routing resources towards anyone other than them comes out ahead in a utilitarian calculation. Of course, those people basically never think of these things in terms of utilitarianism.
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I think the use of "utility monster" should have instead been "inverse utility monster". A utility monster is someone who receives more utility per unit resource than anyone else, and thus via utilitarian calculation, should receive everything. An "inverse utility monster", for lack of a better term, is someone who receives almost no utility per unit resource, and thus via egalitarian calculation, should receive disproportionate resources to make up for this.
I previously used this to describe a case where local governments in Britain were paying £300k/yr on average, and up to £1m/yr in some cases, per child placed in social care. Insane spending per child, life-changing amounts of money for most. But still producing awful outcomes for the child who all this money is supposed to benefit. The consequence is a rapid collapse of local government's ability to fund anything beyond it's legal obligation to fund social care, shutting highly visible and cost-effective programmes like libraries in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable bankruptcy from the cost of comparatively useless social care.
It could also clearly apply to spending disproportionate resources keeping coffin-dodgers alive for another week, or like OP states, social spending on immigrants with barriers like language/culture that make spending on them less effective than spending on existing citizens.
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Maybe the utility isn't in the monster, it's in how much feeding it assuages the guilt of the feeder. So the real utility monster is one's own misaligned conscience.
Utility isn't the name of the monster; it's the name of the scientist who created him.
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I wanted to highlight this because this is not liberalism. If anything this and the wider concepts of identity-politics and collective guilt are the antithesis old-fashioned liberalism. To the degree that old-fashioned liberalism is "dying" or otherwise on the back foot, it is because the priestly claste (ie the journalists, the experts, academics, Et Al) has not only abandoned old-fashioned "tabula rasa" liberalism, but has spent the last 50 years actively trying to tear it down and discredit it in the name of "progress".
How old-fashioned is tabula rasa liberalism really?
Nothing Cremieux and co. are saying would be a shock to liberals of many centuries (well, maybe their Oriental simping). Even when civil rights and egalitarianism became an issue a lot of people may have been for legal equality but not a pretense of blank slateism, especially if it's enforced at the cost of their own rights to sovereignty and freedom of association. They definitely considered gender blank slateism to be nonsense.
While tabula rasa liberalism has some roots in thought experiments about the state of nature that go back to early liberalism, most people didn't actually live by the sort of thorough-going refusal to accept innate group differences and the existence of an underlying human nature in practice until very, very recently.
And that "wokeness" follows that ideology because it cannot live up to its promises but has shown that that ideology is a useful way to erode certain liberal principles (like freedom of association) to create a more powerful state that theoretically could.
At least two hundred years old and arguably closer to two thousand depending on how broadly you want to define it.
"wokeness" follows from Marx. A vangaurd party seizing the means of cultural production rather than material production, to establish a dictatorship of the vanguard party.
The the belief in the absolute power of the state/society is where leftism parts ways with old-fashioned liberalism.
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I think it has a very long history actually, and that is that of the "left wing" from Jacobins to the Soviets to the Woke. The idea that we are all born equal and that society should be changed to not make us unequal is longstanding, however insane it may be and however unpopular with the usually pragmatic masses.
The only times when it was fashionable to accept such differences was when racism could be used as a justification to create a State that would make us equal as new men through eugenics or other mechanisms. Rousseau's ghost haunts Liberalism, locked in an eternal battle with Hobbes. Rules of Nature.
It's Hlinka's simulation, the rest of us are just living in it.
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As far as I know, the Soviets did not insist that all people are born with equal capacities, such as equal intelligence. They of course engaged in anti-colonial activity in the third world, and for all I know maybe as part of this activity at some point they claimed that all races have equal intelligence, but even if they did I'm pretty sure it wasn't a key part of their worldview like it is for today's woke.
It depends which Soviets at which time. But they did all nominally believe throughout that if man wasn't equal he should be engineered so. That's what communism is as a state of affairs, after all. Even pragmatic concessions like NEP or Stalin's Nationalism were a means to that end.
You could only believe that this isn't a key part of the ideology if you did not read Marx or Lenin. The latter's revolutionary coalition relied very much on this, and everything down to the removal of titles, the broad feminist reforms or even the common use of "comrade" as address were motivated ideologically by Rousseauan ideas. Sometimes directly.
Need I remind you that Lysenko got to parade around his nonsense because genetics was seen as reactionary precisely because it implies innate differences that couldn't be changed? Well that and competition rather than cooperation.
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You're doing the old commie routine of "it wasn't real communism". These causes produces these effects.
You can run Liberal society for a bit and consume through the barbarism of reflection, but at some point you run out of nomos, like socialists run out of other people's money.
Liberalism doesn't produce togetherness and lasting institutions. It only can grow a total state where everyone attempts to defect until strife collapses it.
Note that this isn't an elegy of other systems, just a reality check for the utopian ambitions of fellow individual rights enjoyers. It was easy to believe in scientific government during the industrial revolution, it's a bit harder now.
No, I don't think I am. I am not saying that true liberalism has never been tried or that true liberalism does not exist. Just the opposite in fact. True liberalism has been tried. There was a dream that was Rome.
What I am saying is that the ideology currently identifying as liberalism, is not only not "liberalism" as Adam Smith or Abraham Lincoln would have understood it, it is a repudiation of that ideology.
Where old-fashioned liberalism talked about all men being created equal (note "created" not "are currently") and judging people by the content of thier character, not the color of thier skin. Modern "liberalism" says the opposite. Thou shalt not pass judgment on on a persons character, or behavior. A person's skin color is more important than who they are as individuals. Opposition to the dictat of everything within the state nothing outside the state is "Fascism".
What part of arresting state legislatures so they can't vote is liberal, exactly?
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See it's interesting that you'd pick this example, because it is precisely Reagan and his generation of neoliberals (the only ones that merit the name really) that sowed the seed of the destruction of the Liberal order.
It is they who sold nations on the altar of profit and removed class solidarity in the name of global competition. It is they who opened borders under the guise of closing them. It is they who grew the State in the name of reducing it. It is they who started imperial wars in the name of nationalism. It is they who enshrined civil rights as higher law than freedom of association.
And yet liars and frauds they were not at least insofar as that can be said of a politician.
Instead I think they honestly believed in that old dream of a global world where everyone could have their share, where the divisions of old are now but joyful flavors one can pick in the giant buffet of the entire human race. And then we'd go explore the stars or something.
Like all ideologies Liberalism bears the seeds of its own destruction, because like all ideologies, Liberalism is based on lies. The lie that all are equal. The lie that power can be separated. The lie that the individual stands alone.
Faced with internal contradictions, the extremes of liberalism and authoritarianism meet. It is their inevitable destiny.
Reagan's invasion of Grenada did not sow the seed for the destruction of the Liberal order. It is probably the single most clear-cut win for the US (and everyone else involved) in it's history.
I was thinking about Iran. Or rather a general pattern of behavior that leads us here.
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My favorite metaphor is a galley propelled by rowers at the oar-benches. As the rowers start to age out, the galley loses speed. Someone gets the idea to replace old rowers with stone statues of rowers. Obviously this is counterproductive and rapidly starts to spiral, but anyone who objects is thrown overboard.
Maybe a more apt metaphor is replacing aging rowers with cripples or amputees
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I think liberalism is in for another rough century, but assuming it isn't rendered obsolete by AI-backed surveillance states of some sort, I think the same lessons that Europeans learned by 1648 will be re-learned by an even larger fraction of the human race this time around (tree of liberty, blood of tyrants, you know how it goes). It may take a couple more swings of the pendulum back and forth between right-wing and left-wing illiberalism and who knows how many deaths along the way, but people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
Is that true for everyone, or just for leftists?
I see the right/left divide as basically being one of hierarchy/'equity', and since equity isn't a reality-based ideology it's gonna be prone to backfiring, yeah. But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem, at least until those elites hit upon the idea of organizing the masses against competing elites on grounds of equity, at which point we're back to leftism.
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
It's a thorny issue to be sure and relies upon what could be called ineffability to work, i.e. there's no satisfactory intellectual answer from just about any standpoint.
A Christian should be obedient to his priest and the church hierarchy in most cases. However, the hierarchy is made up of humans, who can and do go wrong. At the individual scale this can be devastating and 'should I ignore my priest about this' is a very uncomfortable question for a Christian to ever have to ask. The reality is that most people aren't really equipped to make that call. Ideally the problem is fixed by those priests being accountable to bishops and so on, but in practice the whole system can and does fail. Then again, at one point the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops all decided to reunite with the Church of Rome under the Pope, and the laity stood firm and told them 'no', and the hierarchy demurred.
What we have is a system where we all understand that human components sometimes fail, sometimes en masse, and yet we believe that Christ in His capacity as the head of the Church makes it work out anyway. It's gotten us this far.
Example?
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
(Context for today's lucky 10,000)
Ultimately he has to follow his conviction, as we all do.
Probably my fault but I'm not grasping the relevance.
And my conviction is that trans-women are women in every way that matters outside the bedroom and the doctor's office, that if the mind and body disagree on whether someone is werman or woman it is better to bring the body in line with the mind rather than vice versa, that if two people engage in coitus the morality or immorality of their act does not depend on their genders, and that parents of teenagers developing same-gender attractions or children with genital dysphoria do not have an inalienable entitlement to force or gaslight them into a heteronormative mould.
Human actions, including those that appear to go against nature, might be part of God's plan. For instance, Eliot Page being born with female parts doesn't necessarily mean that He intended Mr Page to live as a woman; His plan might very well involve hormones and surgery.
I appreciate that perspective, as the conversation under the assumption we all have the same values but disagree on facts has been extremely frustrating. That said, do you mind elaborating? If bringing the mind in line with the body is so costly (in the sense that it's better to do the opposite), why is it ok to force the majority of the population to see trans women as women "in every way that matters outside the bedroom and doctor's office"? Also, why those particular exclusions, and how do you argue against people who think even those are also a sign of bigotry?
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I will cut in here to ask how this conviction is compatible with the fact that transgender (biological) men resemble other men far more than they resemble women, and transgender (biological) women resemble other women far more than they resemble men.
The prototypical trans male is a system network administrator and Warhammer collector who grows their hair long and wants to be called Anna, and the prototypical trans female is a slight girl with anorexia who cuts her hair short and wants to be called Eliot. (I've met both in my time). Both display physical and mental traits that are strongly associated with their biological sex and strongly disassociated with the sex they proclaim themselves to be.
How do you draw a cluster that includes women-who-want-to-be-men and men but excludes women, and vice versa? What do they have in common? As far as I can see transgenderism correlates far more with autism and self-loathing than with resemblance to the opposite sex, and therefore fixing the self-loathing seems like the most kind and effective approach.
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The Nazis killed a bunch of their own in the Night of the Long Knives, so certainly right-wingers are at least capable of eating their own. You can argue that the nazis were left-wingers, I guess. "leftism" is such a nebulous concept. But one could also, with as much justification, argue that Stalin was a right-winger.
Leftism is literally satanic in one very specific meaning of "satanic", but early Christianity was leftist by the standards of its time, so it would be rather odd to claim that all of leftism is satanic in any meaningful sense.
To be honest I don't know enough about the Nazis to have an opinion there, but in human politics leftism generally means organizing the masses against the elites by appealing to 'equity', so it'd be hard to call the Soviets anything else.
Not at all. In this case the 'elite' in question is God and conforming to that hierarchy was absolute. Nor were early Christians particularly interested in overthrowing the (human) elites of their day.
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Fascist states have an even poorer track record than communist ones as far as longevity is concerned. Monarchies are stable in the Middle East for now, but their European counterparts were all overthrown or defanged centuries ago, being themselves the soil from which liberalism sprouted in the first place. Just as the printing press and mass literacy fatally weakened the Catholic order of medieval Europe, modern communication technologies pose a dire risk to would-be authoritarians of any ideological bent wherever they have taken root. The CCP has the best chance at riding this particular lion, and newer technolgies may turn the tide in their favor, but so far they are losing the hearts and minds of their younger generations, who are fleeing en masse to Thailand and the West.
Lutheranism took off and spread due to military backing during a moment of weakness in the HRE. It’s way too early for mass literacy, although I suppose the printing press played a role it wasn’t totally necessary- Lutheran-esque ideas had existed and even found local success before.
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My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
I think this is happening.
Consider the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell proposed a theory of history where, from time to time, the middle class overthrows the upper class with the help of the proletariat.
I think there are some similarities to the current situation. 2024 can be seen as a revolution of the middle class tech elite against the upper class deep state. Each side employs its own proletarian armies. The tech elite has rural whites. The deep state has urban blacks and Hispanics. But the lower class armies are largely orthogonal to the intra-elite struggle.
The current upper class traces its status back to WWII. They are now in their third and fourth generation. They are tired, corrupt, and not that bright.
I think the new challengers win for the simple reason that they are far more intelligent and qualified.
The "Middle" in Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism isn't the middle class - it is a potential counter-elite (like the Bolsheviks and their base in the organised working class and the army). Goldstein explicitly says that there is no Middle in Oceania because the regime has successfully prevented a Middle arising - my reading is that Orwell intended it to be obvious that the Outer Party are part of the Low who are fake-promoted in order to compromise them sufficiently to allow them to do particular kinds of dirty work for the regime (such as Winston Smith's day job falsifying history). To use the language of Ribbonfarm's Gervais Principle, the Outer Party in general and Winston Smith in particular (Julia slightly less so) are Clueless.
The tech right isn't the middle-class - it's a relatively small number of billionaires with massively powerful platforms. As Orwell/Goldstein points out, they are a counter-elite, a true Middle who threaten the High. And its story is consistent with one of the two ways of a Middle appearing that Orwell/Goldstein point out - a Middle can split off from the High if a faction of the elite become disgruntled, or from the Low if a newly important class is excluded from power. Musk and Andreesen were absolutely part of the elite in 2015 - we can argue about why they became disgruntled enough to join a movement throwing rocks at the system they had done so well out of, but they clearly did.
The link between Orwell's Middle and the middle class is that the social changes driven by the Industrial Revolution means that there are true Middles arising from the Low consistently from the 18th to the 20th centuries which the High need to co-opt to stay in power. This isn't just the classical merchant bourgeoisie - in many ways it is the class of educated technicians like artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte that is more dangerous (this is the group which right-populists call the PMC and which Richard Hanania calls elite human capital). Orwell writes about this class as a potential tool to overthrow both the traditional elite and the merchant bourgeoisie in the context of WW2 in The Lion and the Unicorn
Possible essay prompt for someone good at wrangling an LLM: "Compare and contrast how Napoleon Bonaparte and Elon Musk parlayed the ability to land a large rocket on a small target into supreme political power."
Yes, "counter-elite" is a better description than "middle class" in what I wrote.
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I would say it's the upper (propertied) class + the proletariat (workers) overthrowing the middle class and the underclass. Wokism is the religion of HR and managers and lawyers, not business owners or brick layers. But that may be a British understanding of class.
Business owners may be rich, but they are generally not "upper class".
Consider, for example, the person who owns a tire center that gives him an income of 1 million per year. He may be rich, but his class affiliation is middle or working class. On the other hand, a NY Times journalist may only make 100,000 a year but is likely to be upper class because of their inherited wealth and educational background.
Now, as always, the only way to be upper class is to be born into it. It is those people who run the DC blob. The tech elite, on the other hand, is largely self-made.
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Yeah, right wing regimes might be subverted, they might rot from the inside and stagnate for generations, they might be conquered, but ‘things get so suddenly worse everyone learns their lesson’ is mostly a far left thing. Humanity lived for thousands of years under right wing illiberalism; we have a deep and abiding instinct for it.
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Your post is topical, because a couple days ago I was blathering about something like this on the The Fifth Column's subreddit. It's also an evergreen topic here so maybe no great coincidence.
Should you read it? Well, I didn't want to edit or consider it much more as I would feel obligated to if I posted it here. It's mostly notepad scratch.
The Fifth Column's episode spent a lot of time focusing on Trumps anti-DEI measures. As Good Liberals they oppose this. Not because they'll be ineffective or unnecessary, though they touch on both of those, but because they are illiberal orders. This wasn't a surprise for me. The hosts are moderately consistent in taking Good Liberal positions when it comes to culture war stuff. For example, they criticized a lot of the anti-woke education legislation to manage curriculums.
It's one of the few podcasts I will listen to and the only politics podcast. They make me laugh. If you can think about free speech advocate, market oriented recovering libertarians you'll get a pretty good idea of the hosts and the content without donating 60 minutes of your time.
From what I can tell liberals are a dying breed. I didn't make the above post to convince people liberalism was dying. I merely wanted to say this was a blind spot for the hosts. That liberals are consistently bad about throwing tomatoes from the sideline while losing respectfully. A trope that can be overstated in spaces such as this one, but with a measure of truth.
Ardent believers want losing to actually be a demonstration of strength. I think that's a weird way to consider losing, but to each their own. With that I conclude liberalism is dying.
Who is going to carry liberalism to the end of the century?
It's a lot of weight to put on The Federalist Society and FIRE*. At some point we may decide this is a Ship of Theseus issue. Nominally liberal people call undemocratic measures life lines for democracy, hate speech laws are necessary to preserve liberal society, and so on. People will stop trying to call illiberal policies liberal ones and we'll know it's dead.
There's been too much change in the last 40 years. Liberalism has already forked a dozen times. Big picture, I believe the hold of 19th and 20th century thinkers are fading further into history, although people have not found a way to supplant them. I don't foresee a lot of ways in which we'll see more liberals 30 years from now. I lament this, but hope it all works out.
Values and ideas don't proliferate without believers and practitioners. Liberals are too easy going. Satisfied to merely complain about their principles on the chopping block. What gives them such confidence -- if it is confidence and not hubris -- I do not know.
To me, people like TFC hosts seek more concerned with purity as opposed to direction while having a strong bias to status quo.
Take the anti DEI EOs. Are they perfect? No. But they also exist in the backdrop of 60 years of civil rights law they Lin fact (if not form) required legal discrimination against whites. These EOs don’t undo that but they are a small counterweight that gets closer to the liberal position.
Or take the public school debates. They had on Rufo and Kmele argued basically we shouldn’t ban woke but talk about it and other teaching. Rufo made two points: 1) someone has to decide the curriculum and if the public is paying for it then why can’t the public decide and 2) there is an opportunity cost to teaching anything.
IIRC, Kmele’s view was that we should do school choice and he simply ignored opportunity cost. Rufo wasn’t opposed to school choice (he supported it) but he didn’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And because of Rufo schools are now more classically liberal whereas if Kmele had his way they’d remain illiberal. I’m not saying that’s the outcome Kmele wants but it’s the problem when you’ll only accept pure policies.
Yes. This seems like a common affliction. I assume it's due to being embedded or adjacent to the media ecosystem, big cities, and the blob in general. The respectability status pipeline. Part of what's wrong with it, with our understanding of liberalism, is that it convinces people that doing nothing is honorable. We are (hopefully) not captains on a sinking ship or defending the Alamo to the last. "We" are steering a nation of people towards some future.
Ah, yeah I remember that. Close to my recollection as well. I even believe him when he says as much, but it's still a side step. More tomatoes from sidelines, more conscientious objecting. Maybe at the end of engaging with the trade offs you still think Rufoism and Trump EO's are bad. That'd be fine, but engaging is important. I won't knock him too much for that, because he does seem fairly consistent. Perhaps if there were more people carrying the banner there could be more room for conscientious objecting. In our own recent history I don't think liberals had many bannermen. If that's the norm, then it looks a lot like surrendering the field.
Yeah, I agree. Rufo has proved a lot. I'd quibble to disagree about this or that. Sometimes his warfare offends me. He accepted a reality that the culture war should be fought, staked an explicit position in it, and pursued it. He found allies where they could be found. I have a lot of respect for that.
I mentioned over on reddit, possibly here at some point, that pop liberal extraordinaire Jonathan Haidt said in 2024 he thinks dismantling the bureaucracy in academia will require top-down enforcement. This made a significant impression on me, because this is the let's organize and work together to get back on track Heterodox Academy guy. That's a yuge concession and it's difficult for me not to respect someone who will make something like it.
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Yes, and it's a good thing, because the entire "Enlightenment" political project was a mistake from the beginning.
This looks like cum hoc ergo propter hoc to me. I've never really bought the case for "technological determinism" whereby a society's political forms are determined entirely by its technology base, and I especially haven't seen any good arguments for the reverse, that scientific and technological progress are entirely "downstream" of particular political forms.
Hayek talked about this a lot! Read the Road To Serfdom, there is at least a chapter on how authoritarian systems reward and elevate the worst sorts of people.
I have, though it was a decade ago. And there's a difference between pointing out how modern authoritarian states can — and do — mess up science, and claiming that science and technological development are entirely, 100%, the downstream product of "Enlightenment" political views — which is something I've seen too many people argue. (Up to and including a person who kept arguing, pre-Dobbs, that if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, every piece of technology invented and scientific discovery made after 1973 would completely vanish from the world and from human memory, because the very existence of any piece of scientific or technological knowledge is entirely "downstream" from and dependent upon every single piece of social and political "progress" up until the moment of discovery/invention.)
If nothing else, the timeline doesn't line up. The beginnings of the scientific method go back to Bacon, and science became a high-status endeavor in Restoration England, when the Invisible College became the Royal Society thanks to the official approval of Charles II. Being a fully "enlightened" liberal democracy is not an absolute precondition for doing science or inventing new technologies.
Of course not. The Nazis invented the V2 :-)
"Absolute precondition" is a preposterously high bar.
I think what Hayek (et al) are getting at is that autocracies elevate certain kinds of people who are, on the balance, do not tend to produce a ton of science or invention. A lot of liberals (your friend I guess) make this about culture (you have to have these free-spirited people so they are unencumbered and blah blah blah) but I think Hayek was focusing more on the differences and quality in the people empowered.
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I am not a fan of liberalism, but I won’t count my blessings as to its end before seeing what replaces it. I would rather let it rot for longer to have a stronger hand when it collapses.
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From time to time I'm reminded of this quote from Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius":
He wrote this in July 1940, in the midst of the Blitz. With the stunning battlefield defeats of the Allies in the west, and the division of the east between the Soviets and Germans, it certainly seemed that liberalism (and capitalism along with it) was Done For. One can not exactly blame Orwell for this sentiment, given that he was enduring bombing raids while writing it; it would seem rather axiomatic. Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries, and when pushed to the brink were endlessly more evolutionarily fit.
I'm a liberal. I am unashamedly so, even if I am certainly ashamed of how liberal democracies have conducted themselves by and large these past few decades (post-1991, to put a point on it). I would not count liberalism out yet. It has survived through far worse periods. It managed after Carlsbad, after the failures of 1848, the nadir of World War II, the spread of communism during the Cold War. Each time it has eventually triumphed as the dominant political ideology. This isn't to say that it won't collapse on itself eventually, or that it has been found decidedly wanting in recent crises, but I think it is far too soon to count it out yet.
Yeah but having America on your side is basically cheating, isn’t it? A massive country with immense resources surrounded by oceans, and founded explicitly as a liberal nation? What if America never existed, or was a much smaller nation the size of say, New Zealand? Then we would all be saying the same thing except it would be fascism (or communism) which is the most “evolutionary fit” ideology
The question is complicated because one could argue that a liberal country, because of checks and balances, would not have made the Nazis' monumentally stupid mistake of entering a war against the UK and France (and they did enter it voluntarily, since on September 3, 1939 they were offered peace in exchange for withdrawing from Poland, and they turned down the offer) despite having no ability to knock the UK out of the war and knowing that the US would be fairly likely to help the UK.
Of course liberal countries also do very stupid geopolitical things sometimes. One could argue that the Iraq war was an example. But I can't think of any example of a liberal country making an existentially catastrophic mistake like Hitler's decision to fight the UK and France. Maybe Kerensky's decision to keep fighting in WW1 is an example? I feel like that is a special case though, since that liberal country was just a few months old.
Not that it wasn't coming eventually, but Germany also declared war on the US even though it was under no obligation to. And that is of course after adding the Soviet Union to the coalition.
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The British won the 19th century for Liberalism without those advantages.
The 20th century is slightly harder. Can the British Empire and USSR win WW2 if the USA is a nothingburger? Without nukes, probably not (it's closer than the American schoolboy view of history would suggest), but in that world most of the refugee scientists who staffed the Manhattan Project end up in Canada so all we actually need to do is to hold out until we get the Bomb in 1945/6. If the USA exists as it does in our timeline but Pearl Harbor doesn't happen, I am reasonably confident that the UK/USSR can win the war without nukes with the US as a sympathetic neutral and, again, we eventually get nukes.
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They were vastly inferior at warfighting, prevailing through sheer size and resources alone.
Germany wiped the floor with Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France singlehandedly. Germany had no oil, no rubber, no tungsten, poor reserves of iron and aluminium, only coal in large quantities. They barely had a navy and only established their air force 4 and a half years prior but put Britain on the ropes nonetheless.
If you look at a map of the powers involved in WW2, you see the sheer scale of allied ineptitude. How can you possibly struggle for so long and take serious defeats when this is the balance of the powers involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_participants_in_World_War_II.svg
It required the primary efforts of three huge countries (one of them fiercely autocratic) to beat Germany. Without the Soviet Union in the war, it's hard to see how Germany could lose in Europe. Likewise with any of the Big Three. Somehow this relatively small country was by far the strongest power in the world, stronger than the next two combined!
And this is despite Messerschmitt being a complete clownshow in procurement and project management, despite German intelligence being horrendous the whole war, despite having their codes cracked, despite not mobilizing fully until 1943, despite bizarre Fuhrer-prinzip orders...
Liberalism is just that bad. After the war, it then took 50 years to overcome the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American liberal alliance had secured all the wealthy, industrialized parts of the world: Western Europe and Japan. The Soviets suffered 27 million dead and conquered the poor parts of Eastern Europe. Their economic system was totally broken. But thanks to liberalism, it was a remotely even struggle. The Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan outlasted Soviet withdrawal, it even outlasted the Soviet Union by a small margin. A liberal puppet government in Afghanistan disintegrated before the withdrawal was even completed.
At the time when the allies were struggling and taking serious defeats, specifically from 1939 to Barbarossa, the balance of power looked more like this: https://i.imgur.com/XWHKkcI.png. I'm sure there's probably omissions in Africa and the Pacific (of approximately no military value anyway) but this gets the point across that many of the countries painted in green on that map were not fighting against Germany in 1939 and 1940, and one of them was even fighting alongside Germany.
There are also several countries that should really be blue even on the map you posted if it's supposed to represent balance of power rather than strict allegiance. To name one, Iran. Not an axis power, but concurrently invaded by the allies.
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It shows that authoritarian regimes pick 10 to 1 resource disparity fights, so they are retarded QED.
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Taffy 3 and the 101st airborne have entered the chat.
If this is the case, why were the axis consistently unable to prevail against the western allied forces post '43 even in situations where they had a siginifigant local superiority in terms of men and equipment?
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest?
The Ardennes Offensive, aka the Battle of the Bulge.
Approx. 52,000 german troops against approx. 20,000 Americans who where cut off and surrounded. On paper it should've been an easy win for the Germans, why wasn't it?
Maybe it was because the Americans knew they had total air superiority, columns of tanks (with fuel!) and broad numerical superiority. They could wait for the weather to improve. They could expect relief.
And the goal of the offensive was not 'encircle and destroy a few cut off Americans' but 'reach Antwerp and cut off the entire American army'.
How about the first three attacks on Monte Cassino? Or Operation Market Garden?
So what?
If the US was indeed "vastly inferior at warfighting" the gemans should have been able to roll them up with minimal effort given that they had a 2 to 1 numerical advantage and that western air-power had been grounded by the weather.
Maybe consider something, anything, a little more broad and wide-ranging than one battle? It's not like this is a new idea:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/05/05/their-wehrmacht-was-better-than-our-army/0b2cfe73-68f4-4bc3-a62d-7626f6382dbd/
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Because, and like the last time the Americans went to war against Germany (you say "allies" and "axis", but let's be real here) and won single-handedly, the Germans were completely exhausted while the Americans were mostly fresh. It turns out that a campaign of island hopping doesn't really require a massive army to wage, and highly mechanized forces like navies and air forces don't exhaust a population's will or ability to fight in the same way.
Remember that Germany, America, and Japan were three of the four newest nations on the planet at the time, and with youth brings vigor and innovation.
(They all began three generations- 70 years- before going to war with each other: Germans would defeat France and transition from a confederacy to a federation in 1871, America would conclusively defeat its confederacy faction in 1865, and Japan would unify its confederate states in 1868. The Soviet Union is the other one, formed in 1917, where House Romanov was defeated by House Stalin. It's not so much the age of the country so much as it is the age of that country's elite- when a large amount of it is defeated it creates living space for newer special interests- and while that won't protect you from going to war and losing, which the French [a 70 year old country themselves at the time] did in 1871, it does put you in a position to be reasonably able to contest with weaker, more sclerotic countries for dominance.)
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Do you have any specific examples?
Probably the most egregious: at the beginning of Wacht Am Rhein, the Germans had designated 1 SS Panzer Corps as the key breakthrough unit on the northern flank of the Ardennes offensive. It was the most fabulously and extravagantly equipped formation in the Wehrmacht at the time by far: 2 SS panzer divisions, 2 Volksgrenadier divisions, a parachute division, as well as two additional armoured battlegroups. It had been the chief beneficiary of Germany's last great spurt of industrial production (contrary to intuition, German war production peaked in 1944). It was the force meant to spearhead the charge through Allied lines and seize Antwerp. Facing it was only a single American infantry division that was brand new to the ETO and only had five of its 9 infantry battalions. It had been placed in this part of the line because it was thought to be safe from attack.
The German attack failed. The Volksgrenadier divisions didn't get anywhere on the first day, so on the second the panzer divisions (which were being held for the breakthrough) were added in, but they didn't make any progress either. And then by that time reinforcements were flowing in and the next week of fighting ended in stalemate. It's kind of amusing to me that some people try to play the "what if?" game with the Battle of the Bulge because never had a German attack had such a local superiority in force and failed so spectacularly, and right at the start of the offensive too.
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Taffy 3 off the coast of Samar, and the 101st at Bastogne to start.
I'm no wehraboo but for Bastogne, the Allies had already gained air superiority in France. Bastogne was playing defense (and I won't downplay the courage of the 101st, it was a damn difficult defense) for 6 days until the weather cleared and air support could relieve them.
Meanwhile on the Eastern Front virtually all major Soviet victories (Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, Berlin) still had the Soviets taking far more casualties than the Germans.
I think some of the late-war soviet losses vs. German losses are a bit overstated simply due to the Soviets generally being on the offensive - which is typically going to take more casualties than the defense
This doesn't really get at the heart of Soviet casualties - it might be true that in attacking a certain specific fortified position the attacker will take more casualties than the defender, but in a modern war where armies have great strategic mobility and the combat power of a given corps/army/army group etc. is sourced from vulnerable rear areas, an attacker that has the initiative has the potential to achieve lopsided victories. This is what the Germans did to the Soviets in 1941, and likewise what the Soviets returned to the Germans in later 1944-45. A third of the German war dead (1.5 million) came in the final four months of the war when the Soviets were able to fully turn the tables and inflict disproportionate losses on them.
The purges had left the Red Army in a state completely unfit for fighting a modern war, and so the Red Army was essentially almost wholly destroyed twice: first in June-July and then again in September-October 1941. From that point on it was such a desperate struggle for survival that the Soviet Union essentially had little time to try to rebuild or improve its institutional knowledge with respect to fighting a modern war. Every element of Soviet warfighting was massively deficient, essentially up until the operational pauses in early 1944 where after they had recovered enough territory (and suffered such horrendous casualties in the process) that they were able/forced to devote serious time and attention to overhauling their approaches to all elements of the war.
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I dunno. Democratic Israel outperforms its neighbors in battle cartoonishly. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is really a democracy, but Ukraine is much more democratic than Russia and punching well above its weight comparatively.
Germany knocked out so many countries, so quickly, mostly due to surprise attacks and incompetence.
If Germany was able to surprise France after a good 9 months of Phoney War, then something was really wrong with France. Britain had years to notice that Germany was building up a powerful army and yet couldn't manage to get enough troops to France in time...
Israel isn't really that liberal, they're more like Britain in the early 19th century or (ironically) Nazi Germany. Liberal countries don't conduct opportunistic border revisions, evict people and settle their land. Liberal countries don't sterilize Ethiopians. Liberal countries don't launch sneak attacks on their neighbours. You wouldn't see Americans storming a military base to protest the imprisonment of soldiers accused of raping civilians.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-party-leader-calls-for-jailing-lawmakers-after-protest-over-gang-rape-of-gazan-detainee/3288858
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HBD. Every time.
And since someone is already typing "North Korea", let me just state that national IQ is a ceiling, not a floor. A sufficiently awful government can ruin any country, but no government can ever redeem a low IQ country.
Israel's HBD advantage during its three existential wars is overstated- 100 IQ Arab Christians made up a proportionately much larger part of Jordanian and Syrian society at the time and Israel's HBD isn't that impressive because Ashkenazim aren't a majority of the population.
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If you would like to argue that Germans are the runts of Europe and simply genetically predisposed towards losing world wars, i would not argue against you.
Germany: we may lose the game, but we always beat the spread.
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What's your explanation for WWI, then? The autocratic Russian and Austro-Hungarian states embarrassed themselves repeatedly, and on the Western Front, Germany wasn't all that different to France or Britain. A theory of liberal military weakness, and presumably autocratic strength, would seem to suggest that autocracy ought to correlate with positive military performance. But that seems more like the opposite of what we see in WWI.
Again, we look at a map. The British empire: Canada, India, half of Africa, Australia. The French Empire: the other half of Africa. America! Russia! Gigantic global empires - plus Italy, Romania and Japan.
The German Empire? 2 tiny scraps of land in Africa and Papua New Guinea. The Austro-Hungarian empire? Small, poor and disorganized. The Ottomans? Mid-sized, poor and disorganized, the sick man of Europe.
Germany had no rubber, little iron, not enough food, they had to choose between fertiliser and explosives.
Germany was massively overperforming, fighting three huge empires to a standstill and knocking Russia out of the war while France and Britain underperformed considering their size and access to world markets. But it was a totally stacked war where most of the strong powers were on one side.
(Italy had universal male suffrage since 1912, it was arguably more democratic than Britain in WW1 but their military performance was horrendous).
My theory is not that autocracy correlates to positive military performance but that liberal countries have inferior military performance considering the size and resources of the powers involved. Autocracies have a huge range from astonishing capacity to horrendous. But liberal states are regularly subpar.
I'd argue that by the standards of 1914, Germany was a relatively liberal power.
I'm actually not all that convinced that the deck was as stacked as you think - it's a mistake to just look at a map and assume that the amount of colour on the map is directly proportional to military power. Germany didn't have a huge colonial empire, but it was a large, rapidly industrialising European power with a lot of human capital, which had also militarily embarrassed France relatively recently in the 1870s. I don't look at French West Africa and therefore assume that metropolitan France should have had an insurmountable military advantage over Germany, its larger and more populous neighbour, with access to the same technological base.
But at any rate, let's grant that Germany overperformed in WWI and WWII. Is that enough to conclude that liberal states militarily underperform? That seems like a lot to generalise fron a single example, particularly considering that WWI Germany arguably was a liberal state, and that illiberal states (Austria, Russia, the Ottomans) also put in noticeably poor showings. If we grant that Britain and France underperformed, that seems less like liberal states being weaker, and more like... well, everybody underperforming relative to Germany. Maybe Germany just had really good fundamentals, or lucked into a few military geniuses and associated reforms, or something else. My point is that the pattern doesn't seem to be "liberal weak, illiberal/autocratic strong". At best the pattern is "Germany strong".
That is, however, a single example, and I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from single examples. For instance, if we go back a century (plus a half, if you're counting from WWII), we find Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was undoubtedly the most liberal country in Europe by a massive margin, and their decades-long overperformance. If you were generalising from the period 1790-1810 or so, where France took on pretty much the entire rest of Europe and kicked them around one by one, you might be tempted to conclude that liberalism is a kind of cheat code to military supremacy.
I'm just not seeing a strong general correlation between a liberal constitution and military underperformance.
Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.
If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).
It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.
That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.
Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.
It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.
Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.
The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'
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Germany massively outperformed everyone else on land for the first 3 1/2-4 years of war; Austria did badly but by Austrian historical standards actually pretty well.
The German empire fought France and Britain to a draw, alone, and defeated Russia while carrying Austria on its back. The balance of resources, population, and geography was against the central powers, same reason the confederacy lost the civil war.
Certainly Germany did very well in WWI, but Germany was also the most liberal of the Central Powers. Austria and the Ottomans both gave middling to poor performances, and on the Entente side, it was the most autocratic power, Russia, that performed worst. This strikes me as a data point against any reactionary theory that autocracies are more militarily capable than liberal states.
Depending on how you count them, you might also count the Russian Revolution and the Turkish war of independence - while neither set of revolutionaries were a liberal dream, both seemed to perform much better on the battlefield than the autocracies they overthrew.
Austria was probably more liberal in practice, at least in the sense of tolerating diversity, even granted that Germany had more liberal government structures.
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If anything, WWI is probably the reason why liberal countries struggled at first in WWII, because they generally did not want to be forced into another mega-war at first, AIUI.
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Indeed, one can argue perhaps that liberal democratic states can be more dangerous in warfare than autocracies:
Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 13 May 1901
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1901/may/13/army-organisation#column_1572 (I still find the record keeping involved in this incredible)
Not related entirely to the point at hand, but two things strike me from this:
As you say, the record-keeping required to have exact meeting minutes of a session nearly 125 years old available at the touch of a button is amazing.
Churchill was always an incredible speaker. The way he excoriates some of his fellows is incredible - "Indeed, if the capacity of a War Minister may be measured in any way by the amount of money he can obtain from his colleagues for military purposes, the right hon. Gentleman will most certainly go down to history as the greatest War Minister this country has ever had." He speaks only once, at the very end of this meeting, and after he's done it adjourns. He'd been an MP for all of three months.
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Is the Allies winning WW2 really evidence of liberal societies with unplanned economies being better when they only won by taking national control of ~their entire economies, in some cases suspended elections, and turned the entire state towards control, propaganda, and bureaucracy?
I’d go so far as to say that “liberal” countries in the pre-WW2 sense just plain don’t exist today. Pre-Wickard v. Filburn the idea that the government even had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses was unthinkable. Such ideas didn’t really survive contact with war.
Wickard was a federalism case, not a natural rights case. It concerned which government had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses. A state law doing the same thing would have been constitutional, but probably ineffective given the nature of the national economy, under founding-era jurisprudence. (It might have been ruled unconstitutional under Lochner-era jurisprudence, but we now consider Lochner anticanonical for good reasons.)
As a separate issue, the law at issue in Wickard was a stupid law. But there are non-stupid laws which regulate the growing of your own grain on your own land to feed your own horses, like a law restricting stubble burning. The law pre-Wickard was that a state government could ban stubble burning, but the feds couldn't.
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Dying? Once again I have to beat my usual drum. It's not dying. It was murdered in 2020 with the totalitarian response to covid.
I'm pretty onboard with the idea that most liberal democracies massively overreacted to Covid, but where I was in the United States was never as bad as the worst stories I was hearing in Europe and Canada. Like, at any time during the lock down I was legally allowed to drive wherever I wanted (when I heard that the UK was pulling people over and ticketing them for driving during the pandemic), and I was always legally allowed to walk my dog (when I heard that some places in Canada were preventing people from walking outdoors, even after we knew transmission outside wasn't very strong.)
I'm sure many parts of the United States had much worse responses, but I hardly feel like our reaction to Covid was "totalitarian" even if it was a massive overreaction. Maybe liberalism was killed in countries like the UK, but not here. Certainly, our reaction was less totalitarian than the WWI and WWII era war economy, and almost all of the power taken during Covid was ceded back. (Though of course, every crisis in the United States makes the government just that little bit more powerful and unaccountable. Whether it was 9/11 turning the country into a surveillance state, or a thousand other little things.)
The US was less bad than Europe or Canada in 2020. This is damning it with faint praise, because the US of 2020 was still something that'd have been unthinkable to the liberals of a decade ago. And much of why it was less bad is not because of liberalism, but because of approximately the political trend represented by the new Trump administration. When I say liberalism was murdered I don't just mean it's place in government but also it's place among the public, since "relatively centrist or centre-left but stridently anti-restriction" describes a tiny portion of the population (I should know, I'm stuck in it!). Centrists that were pro-restrictions are not, or ceased to be, liberals by the definition OP is using.
A concern for me is very much how political the whole situation was. I have no doubt that had a re-elected Trump been the one to institute those measures the left would have been screaming bloody murder about liberty (correctly). That they were willing to support the measures due in no small part to the fact that their political opponents (also correctly) objected was terrifying.
I subscribe to the ape theory of human politics, which indicates that the basic function of politics is to let coalitions define themselves as an ingroup, gain supremacy over the outgroup, and derive outsized resources at their expense. It's the only game our species knows how to play. That seems to have been on display here.
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Trace may be moderate for a democrat but he is a naked partisan for his side, waging the culture war and openly promoting total democrat conquest over the other side. He just believes that the most extreme fringe of his party needs to be reformed in order to achieve this victory.
This sort of contrasts with most of the grey tribe motteposters who might happen to align with one party or the other, but argue with the kayfabe of neutral facts and logic. This may be part of a broader schism in the rat-adjacent-sphere, where Scott and similar types are more explicitly aligning with the left wing, and steering away from topics that may be politically inconvenient. This place only exists because Scott kicked us (and our obsession with inconvenient facts) out of his place.
What inconvenient facts can you post here that you can't post in the comments to a relevant ACX post?
You should ask what couldn't you post on SSC back when the relevant containment measures and splits were taking place.
There was a time when controversial issues got contained first in the Culture War thread on /r/SSC, and then got split off to the Motte. ACX came much later, and Scott was a lot more careful with controversial takes himself.
I don't have a clear memory of the creation of the CWT, but I remember posting in it and the split - I thought Scott wrote fairly clearly in his RIP Culture War Thread that he appreciated the CWT and was sorry to disassociate himself from it, but the hecklers were engaging IRL to veto it and it ultimately wasn't a wise battle to pick.
Right, but it still answers your question, and reaffirms his statements that we're here because Scott kicked us out.
"Scott kicked us out" seems like a dysphemistic way to describe (presumably characteristically nicely) asking the moderators of an independent subreddit named after his blog to stop doing something in association with that name, making this a bit "no true liberal." The top level comment was Is liberalism dying? Scott changed his life to be more liberal online, so, if anything, his online conduct is a pro-liberal trend.
I don't see anything dysphemistic about it. The moderators theoretically being able to defy him doesn't detract from the fact that he wanted to cut himself off from certain opinions, some of which he held and holds himself. If nothing else, your original question "what can (/could) you say here that you couldn't say on ACX" is 100% answered.
Is it more liberal? I've just been told by someone else that any act of repressing information is the fault of illiberalism. You're right it all feels very "no true liberal", but probably not in the way you intended.
What would Scott have had to do to avoid being perceived as illiberal?
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Are you new here? In the past, he specifically banned HBD, to give one example.
When was that? I started reading in 2017, but I didn't read the comments, so I just knew he had a 2/3 kind, necessary, correct rule that allowed Steve Sailer to post Steve Sailer things. The subreddit was a different story.
At one point we were reduced to talking about "muggle realism" and "Horrible Banned Discourse" in the Slate Star Codex comment section when Scott banned the strings "HBD" and "Human Biodiversity" (the former was a play on an earlier euphemism of "Death Eaters" for Neoreactionaries, because Scott, hypocrite that he is, also banned that word after he wrote his posts on Neoreaction).
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How is this distinguished from just advocating for his preferred policies and outcomes, exactly the same way as everybody else?
Is there anyone who isn't a partisan for their own side, or promoting total conquest of their own side?
By noting that he's in favor of voting for one party, regardless of whether it promises to implement his stated preferred policies.
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Contrarians will flip when their side starts winning too hard.
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I think you're basically right. His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left. I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist and believes he has a better chance of tinkering with the Democratic Party to make it into what he wants than he does any other alternative. He's pretty clearly blue at heart.
Given his priorities lately on hammering the left about how it handles education and how it's handled the FAA hiring scandal, it aligns with his stated goals and makes him not the ideologue that I think he is perceived as here, but he has serious blind spots, like Scott Alexander, but perhaps less severe.
John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi. One shouldn't draw overly strong conclusions from that. I can understand why Trace writing the right off might be annoying, but it doesn't make him a fake centrist.
I actually think this is backwards, both specifically and in a more general sense. The rat-left are mostly pretty moderate and hold normie center-left policy preferences. They like meritocracy, institutions, pluralism and tolerance, etc... They hold some odd beliefs, but those are orthogonal to their politics. The rat-right, such as it is, is far more prone to fairly radical political beliefs (e.g. neoreaction, HBD).
Tbh there’s a pretty good chance he voted Obama at least once.
While he is a fictional archetype, he is representative of a number of people I know in real life. The general pattern is that he has fairly moderate (albeit nebulous) policy preferences but doesn't engage with politics very much and is strongly negatively polarized against anything vaguely left-wing. He definitely didn't vote for Obama.
Yeah, at least 50% of the people I run into who meet that description voted for Obama in ‘08. Granted, this could be filter bubble effect- having ‘moderate’ policy preferences is much more left wing than average round here. But also, mathematically, Obama had to get votes from plenty of these people to win Indiana and North Carolina.
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It rather does. As a matter of category, a centrist is a balance of left and right. If they write off on half the political spectrum, they are not a centrist.
If your definition of centrist is 'even 50/50 split in preference for prevailing political parties', perhaps, but that is an unreasonable standard and also a faintly ridiculous one. It would require ignoring actually existing politics in favor of maintaining a dubious notion of balance. Intellectual alignment is not partisan alignment and you don't get to vote for what you want; you get to vote for what's on offer. One can have authentically centrist preferences and still feel one party consistently offers something more aligned with your preferences than the other.
One may also align with one party or the other for more basic reasons. TW has been pretty unambiguous about why he's not aligned with the American Right, and it's not because he's actually a doctrinaire leftist; it's because the American Right thinks he deserves fewer rights and preferentially wouldn't exist.
The location of a center does not care if you think it's unreasonable or ridiculous. A center is a relative state, and it is relative to elements adjacent to it as a whole, not what someone wishes those elements would be. Trying to claim an 'authentic' center is just a No True Centrist fallacy in the making.
TracingWoodgrains is not a centrist because they disagree with both elements the Left and the Right. They are a fake centrist because they are not in the center. That they quibble with the left on matters of tactics is irrelevant.
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Should we not though?
I know from experience that DR3 ie "Democrats are the real racists" is a widely disparaged take here but when the voting preferences of literal neo-nazis are functionally identical to those of the woke left, shouldn't that give you pause?
Who's accusing who of "fascism" again? I cant help but notice parallels between the origins of national socialism durring the inter-war period, (seizing the means of cultural production) and the rise of the woke left over the last 20 years.
No. People have widely disparate reasons for voting for a party. The fact that a conservative centrist and a neo-nazi both have strong preferences for Republicans doesn't imply that the conservative centrist is actually a neo-nazi or the neo-nazi is actually a centrist.
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What makes you say that Scott is explicitly aligning with the left wing, beyond continued displays of his longterm predilections?
The man came out defending HBD. I can't think of many things less leftist.
Perhapse this is an issue of different cultures, but within the specific context of US politics HBD tends to get lumped in with race-essentialism as a subset of collectivist/identity politics, which is in turn closely associated with the US Left, and the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in particular.
This is extremely typical of your output. You use vague passive-voice terms such as “tends to get lumped in with” and “closely associated with” in order to avoid having to explicitly delineate why one thing is, on a granular practical and analytical level, similar to the other. Literally zero of the people I know who enthusiastically promulgate HBD research are progressive. Not one.
The logical implications of HBD (both on a group level and an individual level) are simply not compatible with American-style progressive ideological commitments. Progressivism doesn’t mean “collectivism” or “identity politics”. Those things are, at best, orthogonal to progressivism. They have no inherent connection to the Democratic Party. “Atomized American-style meritocratic liberty-maximizing liberal democracy” is not the default human ideology against which all other ideologies should be measured. You are noticing that two wholly different ideologies differ from yours in the same way, and declaring them the same thing based on that.
In your mind, the only thing that matters in defining an ideology is “how distant is it from mine on the specific axis of ‘focus on population groups instead of individuals.’” But there are a great many other axes of ideological measurement that we can care about!
Identify politics is absolutely a progressive ideology and its proponents (in the US at least) are almost all either current or former progressives.
Similarly the people most vocally in favor of privileging "inate group differences" over individual differences/merit tend live in "blue" counties and voted for either Kamala Harris or a third party, whereas the people opposed to racial sinecures and Identity-Politics voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
You may not like it, but this is what an accurate map of the current US political landscape looks like.
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His motivated reasoning justifying transgenderism arguments is mostly what I think of, but to be honest, I have a limited amount of exposure to Scott Alexander. I found Scott Alexander through this forum (which I in turn found through rdrama.net), not the other way around as I assume was true for many here. Until recently, it was the consensus that he stopped being the firebrand he was in the 2010s, and I found what I saw of his new stuff significantly less interesting than the original Slate Star Codex blogs that were linked here, so I wasn't particularly motivated to disprove the consensus. I prefer the monthly AAQCs to his new stuff.
I'm afraid you're out of the loop, Scott has been been broadly supportive of trans people for about as long as he's been blogging and it's been a subject thrust into the societal limelight. Even when he tackles questions like its potential classification as a mental illness, autogynephilia and so on, he's always advocated for compassion, understanding and tolerance of trans people, even if he's lukewarm about the ideology. He's been remarkably ideologically consistent for the ~decade I've been reading him, so he's not really more leftist than he ever was, and I would peg him as firmly grey tribe, not that it's a very fixed category.
He has been less radical, at least in the eyes of many of his longterm readers, but as he speculated in a post addressing that topic, it might simply be that discourse outpaced him. I consider his recent posts somewhat of a return to form. Even old Scott wouldn't outright endorse HBD, at best he wrung his hands about it, and would avoid it where possible. You're correct that it was his squeamishness (and pressure from his social circle) that made him deplatform the thriving discussion threads of CWR or even some topics in the comments of his blog.
(I'm surprised people come here from Drama. Not that I judge, I lurk for the lolz and did so while it was still a sub. Adversity makes for strange bedfellows, because I can't imagine a forum that has a more polar-opposite culture and discussion norms than /r/Drama when compared to us)
I'm not surprised people come here from Drama considering it's a place where smart people can go and pretend to be stupid, much like SomethingAwful (and its ultimate successor, Kiwifarms) and (depending on the day) 4chan.
People wouldn't really come here from Reddit or Twitter, for those are generally places where stupid people go to act smart (contrast TheMotte's designated stupid zone, /r/culturewarroundup, with the average comment on /r/blockedandreported).
Kiwifarms isn’t really full of people pretending to be stupid, on a lot of threads the actual quality of the writing and the clear intelligence of the commenters is actually impressive. It’s more just strange that seemingly very smart people spend years of their lives chronicling in exhaustive detail the exploits of minor online figures.
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Didnt /r/drama go kind of nuts in 2014? I used to love that place as a lolcow farm that dunked on screeching libs but it went through several cultural changes and purges that its become just a meaner version of leftist subreddits now. Still a bit funny, but more monotonous
rDrama was always kind of nuts and they have always been mean.
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How do you guys even read that website? At least on reddit you could turn subreddit CSS off with RES.
I kind of like the kitty that follows your cursor.
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(I'm taking liberalism to mean to mean pragmatic pro-institution free market globalists. Macron would be the closest example of ones still in power)
More like their substacks took off, and it doesn't make sense for them to do it for free anymore. If anything, it is a clear sign that they're ascendent. Once politically homeless, they now have an audience of anti-woke centrists listening to them.
For decades, Liberals were dominant on both the left and the right. With the fall of the Soviet union, the extreme left was left nursing it wounds. On the right, 9/11 response & economic recovery required large institutional efforts, so anti-institutional groups had no uptake.
AOC and Trump use symbiotic antagonism to shore up support within their ranks. Both would rather see the other win than an centrist. They have embraced horseshoe theory. Liberals are yet to get there. Left liberals still treat right liberals with greater disdain than extreme progressives, and vice versa. Liberals need to work across the aisle to get centrists bill through, while collectively keeping extremists at bay. At the national level, it seems impossible. They have terrible optics too. The centrist left has geriatric Biden/Clinton or DEI hires like Kamala. The centrist right is geriatrics and nepo babies. That's a losing proposition if I've ever seen one.
But there are signs of change among the youth and local govts. Major blue cities have swung to the center. The clearest example is Ann Davidson switching from Dem -> Rep and winning Seattle's district attorney seat. Eric Adams ran on a centrist platform for NYC mayor, and has managed to stay in power despite many legitimate scandals. At the national level, Pete Buttigieg seems to have more friends at Fox News that within the Democratic big tent.
Political trends are cyclic. I think populism is peaking in North America. But I expect Western Europe to get worse before it gets better (for liberals).
It's immigration. Liberalism assumes a certain non-zero-sum-ness to the world. Once low-skill immigrants worsen the QOL of your liberal utopia, liberalism's loses its core appeal. Problematic immigrants come illegally or as opportunistic refugees. If liberalism shows a capacity for strong border enforcement & minimal refugees, then it has a chance. South Korea is it's own mess and has been for a while. Won't equate its turmoil with western ideological trends.
Guess how many illegal immigrants and refugees come to these countries.
I don't think employment based immigration is an issue. (Note, I am on H1b, so take my opinion with that caveat). Australia for instance, maintains steady immigration, but has a higher ratio of skilled immigrants vs the others. It hasn't swung populist just yet. For decades before, Canada & the UK sustained a high rate of skills based immigration and it did not doom liberal-centrists. Even after the total shitshow at Canada/UK, their retaliatory leaders of choice still feel like Liberals (Starmer, Pierre).
Yes
No.
How do I get my Substack to take off? Asking for a friend.
I agree though, I think it makes perfect sense for someone to stop hanging on forums if their writing gets big. Trace did have ideological issues with this place though IIRC.
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My (admittedly superficial and possibly outdated) understanding is that liberalism has never been a significant ideological force in East Asia. Mainland China and North Korea are overtly single party states. Japan (LDP, ironically not particularly liberal nor democratic) and Singapore (PAP) are de facto single party states. South Korea and Taiwan each have two major parties at any given point, but their core disagreements are mainly on how to navigate dealing with their respective existential threats (for South Korea, whether to align closely with the US and Japan vs being more conciliatory towards North Korea; for Taiwan, whether to be more hardline vs conciliatory regarding the PRC), with economic and social policy disagreements having a much narrower Overton window than in Western countries.
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Well, you're certainly in the right place, since this is a subject we've discussed here at some length over the years.
Have you read Zunger's Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept, or Ozy's Conservatives as Moral Mutants? If you're looking to understand the breakdown of liberalism, those two would be my pick for the best place to start.
People act according to their values. When people share coherent values, they are able to live together and cooperate. Liberalism axiomatically assumes that at least a supermajority of humans share coherent values by nature. This is not actually the case; Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment, and mistook the homogeneity of its specific host population for a universal constant of human nature. The truth is that human values drift over time, and can easily reach mutually-incoherent states. By claiming tolerance as a terminal value, Liberalism greatly accelerates this drift, and when values become broadly incoherent, it simply breaks down.
The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.
This is the key point I find myself harping upon, again and again. It probably makes up a substantial part of my current political views. "Process and procedure" can never fully substitute for virtue; there is no perfect system to make even a society of "rational devils" good; and what the focus on procedure does is either empower people skilled in "manipulation of procedural outcomes" to exercise power without responsibility, or build toward Machine Rule. I'm not sure which is worse, the Dolores Umbridges, or the "distributed non-human intelligences" (as IIRC Benjamin Boyce put it).
Either way:
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No it did not. Liberalism is an outgrowth of religious warfare. It’s true that everyone was white in the liberal urheimat, but pre-Proto-liberalism would have seen this as less important than religious differences. ‘Better Turk than pope’ was a popular slogan during this era.
Indeed, during liberalism’s yamnaya expansion in the French Revolution the relevant distinction would have been between liberalism and Catholicism, with the liberal/conservative distinction mostly arising later, after Protestant powers defeated Napoleon for geopolitical reasons.
Religious warfare between Christians. Christianity has many sects but they’re relatively homogenous compared to all the other religions out there
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Homogeneity is relative, and does not preclude warfare; see the Civil War for a pertinent example.
"Freedom of Religion" seems like a good idea between Christians, with some Jews and vanishingly few Muslims and American Indians thrown in. It does not seem like a good idea if half the population are Aztec Blood Cultists. And indeed, we see the principle decay along these very lines, because the values that endorsed the principle are not in fact universally applicable. People are not in fact willing to tolerate anything other humans are willing to call a "religion". Those who coined the phrase did so in reference to their own, highly homogenous context, on the assumption that their present conditions would obtain in the future. They were wrong, and so the internal contradictions come to the fore until the principle has entirely self-destructed.
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My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.
No true Scotsman?
I think you’d have to draw a really strange category to exclude all the deeply ethnic conflicts. There was plenty of Slav- or Jew- or Walloon- or Catalonian-hating going on.
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Non-WEIRD populations fall hard for universalist religions- Islam and Communism are historically recent examples- all the time. The kind of western European identity in which the liberal urheimat can be called homogenous did exist in the high middle ages, with the identity of 'Latins'- but that idea disappeared into sectarian violence in the sixteenth century. The English king's marriage to a French Catholic during the beginning of the enlightenment was hugely controversial and hated by the people to the point of subsequently being made illegal and France withdrew the edict of toleration in the same period. These countries were ground zero for liberalism.
'Religious tolerance among Christians' is itself a liberal idea, although perhaps rooted in the protestant tendency to see themselves as on the same team despite their gigantic theological differences. Perhaps that's why you don't see serious intellectual reactionism coming without Catholic roots; the protestant classical conservatives who aligned against Napoleon put no effort into ideology and even the moderate English version of classical conservatism tends to be aligned with high church Anglicanism when it isn't outright Catholic.
That’s seriously stretching the definition of universalist. Both of those ideologies/religions draw pretty sharp distinctions between groups of people, with fairly extreme hostility
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The most important intra-European religious conflicts in my lifetime have been in former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. In both cases religion was very obviously a proxy for tribal identity, not a religious thing. Unfortunately this doesn't answer the question, because they both happened in transHajnal Europe.
It is, of course, the whole point that religious conflict in cisHajnal Europe is unheard of, except in so far as it involves immigrants from transHajnal places.
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I did read Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept last time you linked it in reply to me. That's actually what set off some of this disturbed line of thinking for me. I'll read the other blog post later. Yes, your past posts are quite illustrative to me, but I was hoping someone else would swing by and change my mind. I don't think it will happen.
How do you cope?
I think I have a pretty good understanding of both the spread of likely outcomes and the prudent path forward, and have made my peace with them. Also, sincere Christianity.
Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.
But upon my trying to dig up arguments against Marxism (probably the most dangerous philosophy I think has a chance of doing anything right now), I found that Karl Marx didn't really outline how socialist countries should make the transition into communism and, in fact, such a thing is probably not even possible. Institutions will try to perpetuate themselves in any way they can. Given this fact, I think DOGE is doomed to ultimately fail, especially if the next administration comes in and undoes the damage it is doing. So what is the prudent path forward?
Furthermore, this episode of history has revealed the weaknesses of liberalism: if you give people their own individual rights, including the ability to speak and convince each other of values detrimental to the state, eventually this kind of split will happen. If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?
This is my understanding of the best likely outcome as well. Picture the federal government as a fencepost set firmly in the ground. The left and right yank it right and left over and over, and each pull loosens the earth around it until eventually it is ripped loose entirely. That is the process we are currently witnessing: a breakdown in the credibility of the federal government, as each escalation converges both sides on "valid only if we control it". The optimistic view is that such a convergence rounds down to "not valid at all", as simply rejecting validity is simpler and easier to enforce than absolute tribal control. Finding a way to leave each other alone is, I hope, simply easier than exercising tyranny over half the nation.
What we're currently seeing, more or less. Blue-Tribe has dominated the institutions and used them to secure unaccountable power. Those institutions must be un-dominated and accountability restored, or they must be destroyed. There isn't really any other option available. The mistake is viewing this as fundamentally about DOGE, or Trump for that matter. If DOGE and Trump fail, the proper course is to escalate again.
In my view, they should retain as much liberalism as they can without compromising society. It seems to me that being clear-headed about liberalism's inherent flaws makes it easier to retain more of it than one can otherwise manage. In the end, though, there are no "inherent rights" in any sort of objective sense. There are values, and some of those values are compatible. Power does what it will, and constraining its abuse is a never-ending responsibility incumbent on each individual human; no system will ever do this job for us, and if we don't do it, it won't be done.
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Did America's heyday have anything to do with liberalism? When do you think the "heyday" of America even was, and why do you think liberalism was it's defining feature, so much so that it gets to own all that greatness?
I don't know man. I used to think we had things figured out in the 90's. If you're going to give any particular era to "liberalism", whatever that means, the 90's would probably qualify. Culture seemed to have definitively move away from a conception of The United States as a white Christian nation, and towards a multicultural melting pot. When I think back on my public school education, probably 50% of our assigned reading were polemics about racism, and the importance of not being mean or prejudging the blacks. It felt like we were getting more color blind in the 90's. Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment calling out anti-white racism.
I now question whether any of that was sustainable. I question whether the 90's were just the brief period between when the radicals had pushed the overton to a fairly neutral feeling middle, and then further off a fucking cliff. Maybe liberalism was always doomed, merely a stalking horse used by radicals to destroy the "heyday" you romanticize. A lot of those 90's liberals have had a fuck of a mask off moment of late. The ones that seemed sincere have defected to MAGA. Or at the very least realize MAGA is the lesser of two evils compared to the DEI race essentialist.
Mostly they weren't wearing a mask, except insofar as the mask was "I actually think for myself and maintain consistent views". Most of them just got dragged along by (social-media-astroturfed) peer pressure; they weren't "really" SJWs in 2005.
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As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
Have you checked out TW's twitter lately? He's all in on "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He's not aiming for liberalism, more like "wokeism with a human face, run by enlightened lawyers in policy think tanks rather than HR ladies"
I'm not logged in on this phone, but if you haven't been following him I can get you the choice quotes
This is, like most of your straw men about your enemies, written in bad faith and not at all accurate. I follow TW and he's posted nothing that could be fairly characterized in that manner. He's consistently liberal and partisan in the sense that he's anti-Trump and, more broadly, anti-GOP. He's never made a secret of that. But the idea that Jesse Singal's former assistant has ever been carrying water for trans activists is absurd on its face. The idea that the guy who broke the DEI FAA story, which has been retweeted by Elon himself and which gets Trace regularly called a Nazi, is "woke" is ridiculous.
You constantly prove you have no theory of the mind for people unlike yourself.
The hate Trace gets for being a liberal gay furry has always been kind of amusing to me. Instead of believing he is what he has always said he is, you need to invent hidden motives and masks to conceal his nefarious true agenda, when his true agenda is out there in the open. And ironically you show yourself as suffering from the same derangement and lack of theory of mind that his leftist crticics calling him a Nazi and a racist do.
Hard as this is for you to believe, people usually actually believe what they say they believe. Especially when they're arguing on the Internet, where there is little value or purpose in pretending to have beliefs or intentions different from your real ones. The only exceptions are people like, say, some of our Joo-posters, who are more or less honest about what they think of Jews but are not forthright about what they actually want to do to Jews.
Notice that KulakRevolt didn't go full mask-off while he was still on the Motte; once he got some traction on Substack and Twitter, he found the grift was more profitable when you stake out an extreme position and appeal to temporarily embarrassed basement-dwelling warlords. It's actual extremists (or grifters cosplaying as extremists) who hide what they really want to say here.
Trace, on the other hand, was never grifting. Much like Yassine, you can hate what he says, but he's saying the same things he always did.
You are unable to make these distinctions and so you are constantly constructing, and even fabricating, things the people you hate haven't actually said, done, or even hinted at.
No, TW is not a trans activist as generally understood, but I think its quite fair to say that the author of this objects on speed and methods rather than principle.
I think he was extremely obvious the whole time. If hes gotten into holocaust denial now, it certainly doesnt really change much for him.
I think TW is actually pro-trans in the same way that Jesse Singhal, the notorious Trans Enemy #2 is. Speed and methods are important.
He was obvious (and explicit) about wanting political violence the whole time. The Jew and race hatred he mostly kept under his hat until he moved to Twitter.
Yes, as in "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He literally says it every time he talks about the issue!
Except "speed and methods" would include whether or not kids should be transed at all. Your claim is that he agrees with trans activists about everything and just thinks they need to be sneakier about getting to where they can physically transition children and put trans women into women's prisons, etc. That is not what he "literally says."
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Wait, Kulak left? And he was grifting, and somehow became an extremist? Can you share a bit more context?
He technically still uses his account here, but only to post his substack links and argue in the comments. Guy got enough traction in the Twittersphere to make money, I guess.
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Technically not gone, but his most recent post was a rant about how we're all useless for not being out on the streets killing our political enemies right now. Meanwhile on Twitter, he's gone full Holocaust denier and RAHOWA, and his schtick is encouraging his followers to go out and kill their enemies and stop believing in fake gay things like governments and coexistence, tribal warfare is all that matters, and also please subscribe to his Substack.
I temper my sense of decency to ask, but... RAHOWA?
It's like NANOWRIMO but for the turner diaries but in Minecraft
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Short for Racial Holy War. Coined, as far as I’m aware, by Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church Of The Creator, and a prominent member of the early White Power movement.
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Wow damn what a twist. I remember him for his insightful posts. He was such a long-time member too, I wouldn't have expected this.
I think you definitely should've expected this. All he ever did when he was here was post about how Americans should undertake violence in order to fix what he saw as the evils of our country. That's pretty LARP-y at the best of times, but was even worse in his case since he's Canadian. Dude was never insightful, all he ever did here was post calls to violence. Now he does the same thing, just on another site.
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I agree with your criticism of Steve, but come on, Trace isn't what he always said he is. Trivially, he's not a "Lee Kuan Yew liberal" in any sense that doesn't make the label deceptive. His grievences with this forum also can't be taken at face value.
You do? Why? Other people have already linked half the evidence I was right. He outright says he just wants to go slow on pushing the "trans kids" thing until nature has been fully conquered with womb transplants. It's literally wokeist transhumanism but not bullying hard enough to cause a backlash. The same goals but managed by clever smooth-talking lawyers who can con people into surrendering instead of fighting.
It's the exact same thing you said you find creepy about him!
Because you told me to look at his Twitter, I did, and didn't come up with anything. I saw someone else post his Substack, but didn't read it yet. If you can post any links, I'd still appreciate it.
You know, that's a not-bad description of what I think about him, but I don't recall stating it like that with that amount of certainty. This may be what the issue is here, fairness demands that harsh judgements are withheld until you have evidence, or at least to qualify them them with an explicit acknowledgement that it's vibes-based.
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I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
Link some. Come on, put up
I don't mean you fedpost yourself -you like it when other people fedpost. Some people very consistently AAQC any "spicy" post no matter how low effort it actually is
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I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
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As someone roughly nearer the same pole as Trace and also subject to that hostile background radiation, I'll agree Trace seemed more sensitive to it, but I do think you're being unfair. He's spoken up against cancellation of right wingers, and he was a long time Motter - I don't believe he was against the principals of extending charity to his ideological opponents all that time. You know everything you've said about him has also been said about (and to) me. At a certain point you become jaded to people telling you you're an evil liar and you should die (yes, I do sometimes get that too), or else you decide you've had enough and you leave.
And also to be fair, FCfromSSCs original posts went beyond "I don't want to live in the same country as you," but to me read more like a near declaration of war.
I realize I'm defending Trace a lot here when I also disagreed with a lot of his stunts (the Schism, the LOTT prank, etc.) But man am I tired of everyone left of center being accused of being a closet Stasi. Yes, I know everywhere else on the Internet everyone right of anything (even to the degree Trace and I are) gets accused of being a Nazi.
I aspire to better for the Motte, but if you saw our mod queue (and especially the "contributions" of people like Steve), it's clear a lot of people don't really object in principal to boots stomping on human faces, only to being the stompee and not the stomper.
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
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I do check his Twitter. In fact, he's just about the only main reason I visit the site, because I value what he has to say. If you can link it, I would appreciate it, though I don't think it's the whole story, since he clearly supports Jesse Singal and thought it was a mark against Bluesky that they were trying to kick him off.
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He only pops up when people I follow get into a spat with him. I scrolled for a while looking for words to this effect, but I can only scroll so far, so if you could get those quotes I'd love to see them.
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Who cares? I've got problems enough without having to worry what happens to a gay furry. Like the local school districts fighting tooth and nail to keep secretly transitioning children, NGOs air dropping 50-100% of my towns extant population in Haitains on us for the crime of voting wrong, and all the hiring freezes of white male applicants at seemingly most major organizations.
After my kids are all over 18, haven't been talked into sterilizing themselves, haven't had their future stolen from them with explicitly anti-white policies in every institution, and haven't had their community destroyed with infinity third worlders, maybe I'll circle back and see how the gay furry is doing. Maybe he'll figure out a place in this world that doesn't involve going "I know the Democrats aren't great, remember that FAA thing I pointed out? But I still think we need to keep voting blue no matter who forever and ever."
"Who cares" is not the response I was looking for. This problem extends a lot farther than Trace, obviously. Do you think China fosters the type of environment that makes this type of forum possible? For how niche it is, for how many types of people post here, for how many ideas can be represented here, this website itself and everyone in it is a product of liberalism. Do you care what happens to it? Do you care what happens to everyone who uses it? Do you care what happens to yourself?
I mean, I don't really have a problem with gay furries being actively discriminated against, perhaps prosecuted under sodomy or gay propaganda laws. If they want to avoid that they should just not be gay furries.
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LOL, oh no, this forum. And it's many diverse views. So diverse the mods keep contriving new and creative reasons to ban me for mine.
This forum has more or less outlived it's usefulness, and effectively radicalized me against it's own principles. All I see anymore are liars using arguments as soldiers to trick the other side into not believing their own lying eyes.
My views are a bit spicier than yours and I've never been banned except for referring to 'the chink virus' and 'devil worshipping jigaboos'. I 100% believe that the rules are about tone and not content.
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As a lurker since long before the offsite from reddit, this describes my evolution as well. This forum is pointless now. Discussion is pointless now. It's war.
It is certianly not war yet, and the probability of war is currently trending downward in my estimation. Discussion is still quite valuable.
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I am (and always have been) pretty far right, but at a bare minimum discussion forums like here are at least sources of entertainment. I enjoy arguing with people, and I can get marginally more intelligent debates here than I can on /pol/.
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This lack of empathy is not what I think the ideal person should have, nor is the victim complex. I suppose this is one example of someone whose values I do not share.
I have empathy for my family over empathy for the gay furry on twitter. It's that twitter meme about the empathy graphs come to life...
Is this just 'gay furry' as thought-terminating cliché? Heck, why do you keep bringing him at all? Why does TracingWoodgrains live rent-free in your head? He was brought up by someone else a few posts up as an example of someone who, whether you like his hobbies or not, has a place in the body politic, and oats then clarified that his point is to do with oddballs and dissenters of all kinds.
The point is not about TracingWoodgrains specifically, or about homosexuality, or about people who like to wear silly fox costumes, and cannot be addressed by going "lol I hate that guy". Oats' point terminated in the question, "Do you care what happens to yourself?"
Maybe you hope for a world in which the hammer of state power comes down on TracingWoodgrains and not on yourself, but that sure sounds like an awfully precise hammer - the type that squishes one specific type of online oddball but not any other type. How sure are you that a world that crushes one guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums isn't going to crush another guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums?
This conversation started out being about liberalism, not empathy. Whether you like so-and-so isn't really the point. But you're using "screw the gay furry" as an evasion. The point is - okay, sure, you can reject liberalism. You can reject the social compact that allows everyone from you to furries to coexist and even have their own discussion spaces like this. But if you reject it you open the door to a lot of boots stomping on a lot of faces, and maybe you shouldn't be so confident that the boots aren't going to be stomping on you.
If nothing else, your views seem significantly more repulsive to random normies than those of gays or furries or, heaven forbid, gay furries. Maybe a little caution is called for.
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The Twitter meme does not imply what people think it implies. It shows the extent of a person's moral circle of concern, and does not mean that liberals care more about distant strangers than their own family or neighbors.
But let's not let actually reading the study get in the way of easy gotchas or reasons to yell at the outgroup, eh?
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Classical liberalism has become a conservative position, and MAGA is inherently less hostile to those.
Economics dictate political leanings- when costs are low and average wages are high, political power of each individual is high -> liberal (political companies more easily replaced, “just build your own X” becomes viable); when they are not, that gets cancelled in favor of the boss’s politics. That can be Christian fundamentalism, that can be wokism, doesn’t matter, they’re all just as bad.
"Classical liberalism" was an 18th century ideology that was dead by the 20th, and bears little resemblance to the positions of people who currently claim that label — as Auron Macintyre put it, John Locke would throw James Lindsay down a well. I also saw someone on Tumblr coming at this from the opposite direction, arguing that Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. should not be called or considered "liberal" — again because their actual positions were far from what's considered "liberal" in the current century — and that at best they were a sort of early "proto-liberal" who laid the groundwork for what eventually became liberalism. In both cases, the position is that modern "liberalism" and the "liberalism" of Locke and Hobbes are such different ideologies that they shouldn't really share a label — the disagreement is one which one gets to keep the "liberalism" label.
Do note that outside the USA "liberal" still does not mean what it has come to mean in the USA.
Our centre-right laissez-faire party in Australia is called the Liberal Party (a.k.a. "the Libs"). It is mostly opposed to SJ (though it's not a full-on conservative party like its coalition partner the Nationals, nor an alt-right party like One Nation or the United Australia Party), and as such has a credible claim to being the most (classically) liberal of our notable parties.
(Our SJW party is the Greens, who want to ban One Nation and the United Australia Party and throw people in jail for hate speech. Labor is our centre-left party, who have become fairly SJW but nowhere near that extent; with that said, the Greens are Labour's usual coalition partner if it needs one - most recently 2010-13; it's currently governing alone - so weirdly enough the scenario I've been dreading for the last few years is an election landing in the middle such that the Greens can play kingmaker.)
Yeah, but they still probably have opinions on freedom of religion and atheism that Hobbes and Locke would find anathema, opinions on diversity that Mill would reject utterly (see the quote from mill that /u/Lykurg posted above); opinions on feminism, the franchise, civil society, and so many other domains that any 18th century liberal would find beyond the pale.
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Yes, (classical) liberalism is certainly on the downswing now. Noah Smith has written about that here and here. Liberalism is the rebellion now. Wokism was obviously authoritarian. The dissident right, while they liked to pretend they were liberal in order to criticize the left, were mostly liars whose real issue with the woke was that it was the wrong type of authoritarianism for their tastes. It's like how early Atheism dunked on Christianity almost exclusively, but principled people like Dawkins said something to the effect of "obviously my critiques apply to Islam as well" and was punished for it because most people in the movement were never really about principles, they just wanted to sneer at their outgroup.
This is ridiculous. Liberalism was the rebellion 10 years ago, and Noah Smith dutifully contributed to crushing it.
The dissident right does not pretend to be liberal. Liberals are freaked out by it, and call it the "woke right". The liars are, again, people like Noah Smith, though the liberals themselves haven't quite covered themselves in glory when it comes to honesty regarding their criticism of the dissident right.
They absolutely did, pretty constantly too. They argued in favor of free speech and against things like top-down enforcement of morality.
Now the mask is coming off since Trump is in power again.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Care to link an article or two? I vaguely recall Noah being somewhat woke previously, but it was mostly halfhearted, and he's been calling for its elimination for over half a decade at this point.
Who, specifically are you talking about? One thing to keep in mind is that people change their mind - I used to be liberal until recently, and am dissident right now. At no point did I lie about my views.
How is Trump limiting speech or imposing morality top-down?
I'll look for some quotes tomorrow. If you can link some anti-woke and pro-liberal postings of his re: covid lockdowns,vaxx mandates, BLM, and the Twitter Files, I'd also appreciate it.
Musk is a pretty good example here. He claimed to be a "free speech absolutist", but then he started censoring a bunch of things he didn't like once he took over Twitter.
Looking for old articles is pretty hard on blogs, but I found several from Noah going back to 2021, e.g. him arguing against woke, arguing against motivated leftist science, and this one arguing against decolonization narratives.
I'm one of Musk's biggest critics around here, so I'll happily grant you that he's not what he portrays himself as, but he's not a very good example for you, for a couple of reasons.
First, he's not dissident right. He was censoring them in the aftermath of H1B-gate.
Secondly, this is like trying to use Zuckerberg, Bezos, Dorsey or any other Megacorp CEO that was full-woke, and suddenly discovered moderate liberalism. These people aren't liberals, woke, dissident right, or anything else, they're just covering their asses.
I was hoping for examples of public intellectuals or activists. Liberals would be people like James Lindsay, Peter Boghosian, Jordan Peterson, Johnathan Heidt, or Konstantin Kisin. Dissident right would be people like Yarvin, David Greene / Distributist, Auron MacIntyre, or Lomez. There's people who are kinda borderline like Chris Rufo (but I haven't seen him either promising free speech or censoring people), or people who changed their mind over the years like Carl Benjamin.
The liberals are still liberals as far as I can tell, and I haven't seen any phenomenon of any of them suddenly moving to the dissident right, when they got power.
Re: Noah Smith, I found some tweets where he was supportive of BLM, and seemed to think lockdowns were good, but you were right, and he seems a lot more reserved than I expected. Maybe I confused him with someone else.
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All I've seen is the money spigot turned off to all the left's NGOs that enforce morality and police speech. Are we doing some "Not letting me enforce my morality is actually you enforcing your morality" uno reverse move?
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I think parliamentary democracies were made to solve this problem.
Instead of choosing 1 person to dictate so much despite barely winning with 51% of the votes (a landslide by american standards), you can have an unlimited number of parties that can represent more than 2 ideologies, and in order to form a ruling coalition they have to make compromises with each other.
This is nice also because you don't have to vote "for the lesser evil", if you ideology isn't a perfect fit for any of the current parties it is a common practice to just create a new party, AfD for example was funded in 2013 and it is making tons of headlines after only ~10 years.
But the executive is still composed exclusively of the most popular party. Since Westminster-style democracies are a lot more unitary as opposed to the more balanced approach by the US you can run into a situation where that single party is thus permitted to do things like
import voters they're hoping to be singularly loyaldestroy the economy and otherwise abuse the powers of the office through its various levers.Parliament is far from a solution.
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But Germany is one of the parties that I mentioned in the post as being failures of liberalism. The parliamentary system collapsed. The other parties weren't willing to work with the AfD, finding them too detestable. Am I reading the situation correctly? The government will pick itself back up, but the problems of having fundamental disagreements within the country will continue, and get even worse.
This is kind of related to the thinking I've had on Marxism lately... I don't think the Founding Fathers properly understood that having people in the country that are opposed to the principles of the country are extremely corrosive to the country. Like the rationalists, they thought that the marketplace of ideas would win out, and that free argument would expose the wrong headed ways of thinking, just like exposure to sunlight kills germs. But they turned out to be totally wrong. People aren't rational.
I’m not sure I would call two hung parliaments the fall of liberalism. Especially not when it’s France and Germany. The French Republic has ceased to exist and been recreated five times already, and Germany has only been a republic for 80 years. And arguably, Germany has only been actually ruling itself for about 25 years.
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This is all virtue signaling, it was very easy to say that while AfD was so small that cooperation wasn't needed. Since they are still growing, the CDU did cooperate recently with the AfD to pass some anti illegal immigration laws.
This is only after it started looking like they could outright get an absolute majority. FDP and Greens were in ruling coalitions while being absolute nobodies as far as voting percentages went.
Yeah the ruling coalition isn't based on numbers alone, parties form coalitions for being ideologically similar.
Have you ever seen the compositions of German coalitions??
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They were never even remotely close to an absolute majority.
I meant if present trend continues. I think they were already the second biggest party per recent polling, and have more than cracked the threshold of a cabinet position or two, as per standard German politics, so its not just empty virtue signalling.
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I think the two or so concerned German posters here would actually contend that other parties working with the AfD instead of trying to shut them out would not, in fact, be the end of Germany or possibly even the end of the German state as it is currently understood. A collapse of one set of preferences does not have to mean a total collapse of a liberal system, in my estimation, and I think this is where you're getting tripped up: a correction/realignment of the political landscape can be very painful, as we've seen, but it may be necessary and even actually prevent the downfall of a liberal system.
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I mean, to be fair, the President isn't supposed to have as much power as Trump (or any other president of recent vintage) has exercised.
We're at the end of a long process where every crisis saw Congress adding emergency powers to the presidency, and that, combined with Congresses' current dysfunctions, created a situation where the only source of change is the Executive.
A system will always collapse at its weakest point. In the past that has been the Supreme Court (witness Obergefell), and at various points it has been the Imperial Presidency.
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