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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

It's not, though, and the people crowing about it don't understand how the game is played. And I'm not saying that because I'm butthurt that some journo I've never heard of that's supposedly 'on my side' is the unlucky ox du jour.

When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer.

When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism. The small fraction of principled libertarians are slinking off, having lost again, while the conservatives pretending to be principled libertarians are cheering the fact that the libs are getting owned.

They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people. And it needs to be more inspiring than 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' People need to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. It needs to be more than 'I'm really angry after the last 5 years and after forfeiting all my morals I just want to hurt my outgroup,' which, I don't mean to pick on that commenter personally, but that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here.

And you know what? There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade. Something has to change; I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.

They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people.

I've read this thread yesterday. It asserts that Musk stands for a compelling and coherent vision:

As Tara Isabella Burton explains in her excellent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, traditional organized religion is in freefall [...]

Taking religion's place as a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are various ideologies:

Mindfulness/yoga, tarot/astrology, social progressivism, LGBTQ+, wellness/self-care, online communities like Reddit & the Rationalist community, new age spirituality [...]

Burton identifies two as the leading contenders for the title of official civic religion:

Social Justice Culture and Silicon Valley Utopianism

Social Justice Culture (SJC): The belief that racism, sexism, & other forms of bigotry & injustice must be struck down at all costs in order to achieve a better, fairer world on which all our fates depend. The think tank More in Common estimates 8% of Americans agree

Silicon Valley Utopianism (SVU): Holds a deep faith in our ability to optimize human performance, ultimately leading to a utopian future in which humanity transcends its limitations using technology. Includes subgroups like Rationalists, Transhumanists, & Effective Altruists

While they might seem to be at odds, they are really two versions of the same underlying belief: That the orthodoxy of the past must be abolished in order to usher in a bright new future for humanity, one that treats personal experience as the ultimate source of meaning

[...] With all this in mind, Elon's purchase of Twitter isn't just a business transaction. It represents a hostile takeover by the SVU of one of SJC's most sacred sites – as if the Palestinians occupied the Temple Mount and began using it as a base of operations

Not defending the Temple Mount frame or California-centric analysis, I have to admit that the Civic Religion angle is apt. As @2rafa observed, my support of most tenets of Muskianism is essentially irrational and quasi-religious, following from my basic Cosmism (that Musk, as a deathist, unfortunately disagrees with) and qualified belief in technological solutions to problems that, while social in nature, partially follow from scarcity and technological limits.

Compared to SVU or SJC, what do libertarians offer in the marketplace of ideas? If they know what's good for them, I think they should position themselves as a minor sect allied with the former church.

Likewise for many others. The vision of SJC is totalizing and unforgiving to competitors, being rooted in absolute zero-sum philosophy.

I think the point is essentially that Musk stands for a very slightly different form of progressivism. This is fundamentally still not only Hegelian grand narrative, humanity’s destiny, march of history type stuff, it’s the specific variant of that stuff that emerged in mid-20th century America. America has been liberal from the start, but this is a sub-variant of a sub-variant of liberalism that seeks to bring about the same thing as sought by the social justice advocates, just slightly differently.

What? Progressivism? Is this just nonstandard terminology, like when libertarians call themselves Classical Liberals, as though libertarianism bears any resemblance to liberalism in the modern taxonomy? Or do you see Musk as actually caring about anything that Nancy Pelosi fights for? In the modern world, "progressive" means "the liberal wing of the liberal party." It's the Squad, John Oliver, pronoun-ism and anti-racism.

Best I can see he is purebred John Galt: low taxes, OSHA can get off his property, openly ridicules pronoun people, doesn't give a shit about worker protections, busts unions as hard as he can, acts like every pointless midwit diversicrat who draws a salary from his companies is effectively stealing from him, and has the absolute audacity to think that people who achieve things deserve more credit and power than people who don't.

No it's not nonstandard terminology, it's standard terminology. What is "progressivism" if not a belief in capital-P Progress? That there is a "right" side and a "wrong" side to history and that being on the "right side" is the same thing as being on the "winning side".

Any fight between Elon Musk and Nancy Pelosi is an intra-tribal squabble between two wealthy secular bay-area liberals.

What is "progressivism" if not a belief in capital-P Progress?

I already defined it in the post you're responding to. It's somewhere between tedious and dishonest to insist that words should be used to mean the opposite of what people actually use them to mean because of their etymology.

Here's the dictionary:

pro·gres·sive

/prəˈɡresiv/

noun

1.

a person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas.

"people tend to present themselves either as progressives or traditionalists on this issue"

2.

GRAMMAR

a progressive tense or aspect.

"the present progressive"

Can you describe the mainstream definition of "social reform" or "new, liberal ideas" without invoking "progress"? I'm not sure you can.

That is a completely different kind of "progress" than the progress that Elon Musk believes in. What are we even disagreeing about at this point? You think Elon Musk is a progressive in the mainstream sense of the word?

working in a tech hub and knowing a lot of this type of person their response would largely be that those problems are trivial. First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.

The second assumption is that tech runs the world and everything else is a sideshow. Going from primitive agricuture to the nuclear age is a much larger step than deciding who does the dishes or writes meeting notes. The idea is that tech leads and the rest is mainly commentary to it. The big issue is having a trillion people living in rotating space habitats with a GDP per capita 20 times that of a current western nation, not figuring out how many members the local school boards will have on each rotating habitat.

These types of technoutopians tend to favour descentralization and not really want a specific system for the whole solarsystem. The idea is 3D printing and AI can allow for relatively small groups of people to achieve autonomy and with tens of billions or more people spread out in the solarsystem many different systems will exist in parallel.

First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.

This assumes that the relevant problems are, in fact, material. What if they are instead zero-sum games of pure status? That's what the last 20 years increasingly looks dominated by.

Prosperity and the huge gain in productivity created by the internet and the computing revolution has hardly made culture war less salient than it was a few decades ago

Salience is a subjective metric. Plebs are more placated than ever. Folks here have been losing their minds about excesses of BLM, but compare it either to the '92 race riot or the terror wave in the 70's.

There's a great deal of simulacra running wild; most are ephemeral. With actual virtual reality we may wage entire world wars that'll amount to moving bytes around.

I suppose techno-utopians wouldn't count the current condition as a win. But it is largely a product of tech, and economy built on top of technological improvements.

In any case, not caring a lot about the culture war is a legitimate position to hold, and one expected of people who are more interested in objects than in other people – as in, most STEM nerds.

How will the Martian cities function? Will they be full of men who, like Musk, leave behind a dozen children raised by three single mothers, one of whom was likely never even romantically involved with the father of her children? Will they contain men who run several vastly important businesses (in addition to the above family) but who spend hours every day engaging in banal reciprocal bitching with irrelevant minor press figures on twitter dot com? What is the structure of this society? How is it to be governed? What will its social systems consist of? What will provide its spiritual, religious core? These questions remain unanswered

All these things are details. The main question that is unanswered - aside of question whether Earthly life can survive and prosper long term in Martian gravity - is:

Why? What exactly would the settlers on Mars do, how would they make money, where exactly would come the promised super profits that would justify the super expenses?

Old time colonialism was not done for "destiny", if was done for very concrete benefits (gold, silver, slaves, spices, sugar, tobacco etc...). What Musk promises is, at best, 19th century flag planting in most remote shitholes of the world for "national honor", only several magnitudes more expensive.

The only reason technoutopians justify Martian bases seems to be “in case Earth is destroyed”.

Some libertarian types see space colonies as "land of freedom", as place to hide and escape from "the gubmint". This is even more delusionary take.

If/when Elon delivers what he promised, Mars will be as remote and hard to get to as Antarctica and Arctic are right now. Are people fleeing to Antarctic bases or Arctic oil platforms for freedom or for place to hide?

Some libertarian types see space colonies as "land of freedom", as place to hide and escape from "the gubmint". This is even more delusionary take.

Indeed, Heinlein's Lunar Authority as it existed before the unlikely events of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably a better model. Whoever controls the air is the totalitarian leader of society, and if you don't like it you can breathe vacuum.

I think your persistent schtick of grilling leaders over being poor role models doesn't make for good critique. We may live in a fatherless age, but that doesn't mean it's healthy to seek a Daddy in Musk, Peterson, Trump or any other vaguely authoritative and charismatic male; thus, irrelevant if they are underwhelming in that capacity, as most remarkable figures throughout history have been, in any case. We need some way other than celebrity worship to impart values to laymen. There was a certain institution called Church that worked on that, if memory serves.

it’s the specific variant of that stuff that emerged in mid-20th century America. America has been liberal from the start, but this is a sub-variant of a sub-variant of liberalism

From a stratospheric (say Duginist in Noomakhia) point of view where Pharaohs and Plato and actual Nazis and Haredim stand on the same ideological game board as early 20th century progressivists, SJWs and Musk, it may look like «SVU» is a tiny elaboration on a basic Enlightenment take, an unremarkable niche within a niche. But that a priori search space only exists in the abstract; most of those regions either cannot be upscaled for purposes of industrial civilization, or accessed without a catastrophic transition event. Progress may not reveal the Hegelian truth of social organization; it certainly prunes branches away, and all the diversity that practically matters is the diversity we have left on the table. In this sense, Muskianism – or Thielism, or a more broad techno-optimistic «SVU» coalition – is very meaningfully different from «SJC». Space colonization as opposed to penny-pinching footprint optimization, the doctrine of growth as opposed to degrowth, supply side thinking as opposed to grievance-driven spoils system – all that is consequential, more so than speculative details of communal living and sexual mores in eventual Mars colonies. Even if it doesn't have enough verbal novelty to entertain you.

One can read the Quran and Hadiths and come up with a relatively firm picture of the ideal Islamic society in practice.

Are you bullish on Islamists inheriting California? What would you suggest to invest in?

I agree having more explicit and legible work in the ideological direction would be nice. These rich dudes should employ someone talented for that purpose, like their opponents do.

Neal Stephenson, maybe.

There was a certain institution called Church that worked on that, if memory serves.

Lazy counter: isn't God simply the ultimate surrogate father figure, the Biggest Daddy, if you will?

That's not a lazy counter, that's the fucking point.

I recently re-watched the old George C Scott adaptation of the Christmas Carol and the thesis of that film could be summed up as "what's the point of being rich if you 'aint going to get a bitch pregnant". Less flippantly it's about legacy, it's about what's going to out-live you and who racking up a high score on your bank balance doesn't mean shit if it all just goes back to the bank when you croak. Accordingly, reject nihilism and all that liberal nonsense about your life belonging to you. Embrace parenthood. Raise children, train protege's, and build institutions. Choose life.

In terms of leaving a legacy, spreading your memes is better than spreading your genes. Is Andrew Carnegie remembered for his children or for the various universities, charities and other organizations he founded?

But if the goal is to spread your genes, a billionaire today could easily have hundreds of children using IVF. Though I imagine he wouldn't be a very good parent.

The play would be to offer couples with infertile men/lesbians access to your (presumably pretty high quality to begin with) banked sperm in exchange for an annuity valued at several thousand per year in perpetual income and all the expenses of IVF paid. Then your child has two parents, and instead of the parents paying out thousands to get pregnant someone pays them. Sperm banks exist, make your product negative cost there will be pretty good demand.

That's not the point of what I was responding to, though? Dase was pointing out the celebrity-as-father-figure thing, and I was raising the point that replacing the fake-but-physical father figures with one that is completely intangible and invisible probably isn't much of an improvement, even accounting for the "reject false idols" and "the concept of God is less impermanent than a mortal human" aspects.

Well, I alluded to «what would Jesus do» prompt, and Jesus Christ is not just God and ultimate role example for Christians but a Superstar, of course. Still, he has the advantage of not being an erratic American CEO.

And even Church doesn't recommend following Jahweh's example.

They do add some confusion with the whole Trinity thing.

They do add some confusion with the whole Trinity thing.

I was always under the impression that BPD is part of the traditional Middle Eastern conception of fatherhood.

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