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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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?

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