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MIT just published a free speech manifesto that would have gotten people crucified a few years ago. The FBI is claiming that demand for white supremacy outstrips supply. I don't think the pendulum is going to swing back to some evangelical Christian theocracy, but I think the worst ideas of the last decade will be curbed and the pressure will relax. Trump 2024 being the wild card...
I'm not sure I'd be so dismissive as to call it a distraction, but I see the culture war as a block (or more cynically, a lever) used to pit us against each other. I believe there are clear, positive-sum, winning policies we could adopt on many of those issues if we could react to proposals from the other side with something less than rabid, all-consuming hatred and default opposition. And failing that, at least work out compromises.
What do you think needs to happen to promote cooperation rather than backstabbing/defecting on society?
Maybe, maybe not. We have the means at hand for much more participation in the political process than the Founders did; virtually every citizen carries around a device that could instantaneously be used to vote in referenda. Our citizens are more literate, more educated and more knowledgeable than they've ever been in history. Or, despite this, you may want to restrict participation in specific referenda to citizens sufficiently knowledgeable about a specific subject matter...but then the issue becomes preventing people from gaming the system (i.e. if you're a neo-Republican/Democrat, here are the answers to the quiz they will ask you before you can vote, recruiting people to a cause, activists trying to insert questions primed to only let the right type of person vote, etc). The system described in Too Like the Lightning has always struck me as interesting as well - a small number of nation-states unbound by geographical location that you opt-into, forcing them to compete aesthetically and materially for members.
The development of ever-more-impressive models makes me wonder if at some point, a centrally planned economy run by an oracular AI would start to be able to outperform the free market.
Would these just be minor tweaks to Liberalism, or a sea change in society? I can see any of these being transformative and potentially outperforming groups that stick with the old formula.
Fair enough. I assume you're referring to something like google deprioritizing conservative media in search functions rather than some media organization encouraging true believers to slaughter the infidels.
I think there's a number of distinctions to be made here. There's a beneficent paternalism, where the plebs want something really fucking stupid or two clearly contradictory things, and the elites ignore it to take (what they think is) the better option. There's a parasitic antisocial option, where the elites actively pass legislation that will help them extract wealth and resources from the plebs, ossify their own power, or just harm the populace because sadism. And you could imagine a situation where we elect representatives, and they simply vote directly as their constituents would want based on how popular any given issue is in their state (but then why have representatives in the first place?).
I assume all of these are simultaneously happening, although I also expect that #2 is significantly less common than people seem to think - I just don't believe conflict theory is widespread in American politics, particularly at the higher levels of government.
I largely agree with the rest of your points. Where I mostly disagree with you is seeing intentionality or conspiracies on the left formed with the aim of punishing you or yours. I can sometimes see how it could come across that way to you (rhetoric from the LGBT community about coming for your kids, etc etc), but other times I've been closer to ground zero and have largely only met people with good intentions. Whether that generalizes to other fields or I'm just being naive.../shrug.
I've been following these sort of news, and hoping one of them might herald some sort of turning of the tide for years. At this point the most I can say is I'll believe when I see it. The only topic where I could see a real rollback happening is trans issues, but even that is far from decided.
And even if you're right, this sort of sours the whole thing. If one side doesn't get their way in an election means we're right back to firing people for cracking their knuckles, using the mainstream media to sic half the nation on a teenager that smiled the wrong way, and burning cities, then are we compromising and cooperating, or am I being terrorized?
There's a certain "draw the rest of the fucking owl" quality to it where it seems at once obvious and unattainable, but what I think we need is politics-free spaces. They used to be pretty common: sports, music, film, games, crafts, hiking, bird watching... anything that lets us see the common humanity in each other, and forget about our differences. I regret to inform you it's an open front of the culture war.This is why I think the culture war issues that at first glance might appear the most trivial, are some of the most serious. Drama in a knitting community might seem absurd in it's pettiness at first glance, but if it happens, that's one less place where people can tune out the culture war, and focus on something constructive. And if it keeps happening often enough, some people might start feeling that even the drama-free places come with an asterisk that says "so far".
Call me conspiratorial, but I don't think these fronts were opened by accident either.
Basically-anarcho-capitalism, and literally-a-star-trek-episode? I'll file those under revolutionary, and sinking or swimming on their own merit, rather than an extension of liberalism.
It could be either, it all depends on the scale, and the "mainstreamability". When it's some some open source projects like Mastadon banning "chuds" from their federated network, I can shrug and say "fine, let them have their little circle jerk". When it's Twitter or Google I take it a lot more seriously. Similarly when it's some edgy fedposter calling for slaughtering the infidels, I just assume someone had a bad day. When it's Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, that's a lot more scary.
Are the elites better at not wanting stupid or contradictory things? Shutting down nuclear power to fight global warming? Trying to bring democracy to places still running on tribalism? Welcoming hundreds of thousands of refugees with a very different culture, and assuming the differences will just automatically work themselves out? Mandating that you wear a mask as you enter a restaurant, even as you're free to sit there maskless for hours as your munch away on your meal?
The difference is my stupid ideas are confined to the threads of this website, and conversations with my wife. Their stupid ideas are actually implemented.
I'm well aware, I come from a lefty background myself. I used to have quite a few friends who started leaning heavily into social justice some years ago, and I take a peak into lefty spaces every once in a while as well. For the most part I haven't detected any "bad intentions" either. The thing is, I could write a whole book about why that does not matter, and is arguably worse.
For one you don't need everyone, not even anything close to a majority, to be in on the conspiracy for it to work. The Rotheram police wasn't into sexually abusing kids, but they were still actively enabling it because of how our society is set up. This is how this conspiracies on the left* tend to work, in my opinion, a handful of sociopaths leading people with good intentions. Which leads us to another point, that someone who did have so many good intentions, and instead was just looking to benefit themselves for example, might at some point be stopped by some sense of "maybe it's not worth it". But tell someone they're actually doing good by fucking someone else over? The sky is the limit!
*) I want to make it clear that I don't believe there is anything specific to the left in these things. It's just a historical accident that they're a go-to example nowadays, and like I said I half-expect some switch being flipped in the mid-term future, and nerdy rationalists becoming the sociopaths.
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