I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
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Notes -
I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
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