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This is just absolutely ridiculous and demands justification
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…….Hlynka, the reason why people like me get so frustrated with you is that a lot of the time it just seems like you don’t actually take any time to really read what people actually wrote or even make an effort to evaluate our actual arguments; you have a handful of stock arguments prepared and you deploy them, regardless of their precise appropriateness to the specific argument or interlocutor you’re responding to, as a way to sort of rhetorically pump your shotgun and let us know we’re not welcome on your property.
And it’s not fair for me to get frustrated at you for doing this, because that’s the correct and appropriate strategy for Reds! I don’t mean that as an insult or to infantilize you, although I’m acutely aware that this is how it will be received on your end. What I mean would be more clear to you, I think, if you made an honest effort to understand the arguments in the “Babble & Prune” essay that I myself linked. Surely you’ve been kicking around these spaces long enough to have stumbled upon that essay before.
The entire thrust of that essay is that Blues represent the “Babble” half of the dialectic, meaning that their whole purpose is to come up with a ton of ideas, the majority of which will be wrong. So, not only can people be both “smart” and “wrong”, it’s probably on average more likely that a given idea formulated by a smart person is wrong than that it’s right.
Furthermore, I have talked extensively about my own major change in worldview within my own lifetime. That means that not only can smart people be wrong, I was one of the smart people who was wrong. Like, really wrong. Like, potentially irretrievable damage to my life outcomes type of wrong. If I had listened to Reds, and adhered to one of their prescribed life templates, my life would be unspeakably better right now. But, if I’m honest with myself, I was never going to - not when I was young and shit-hot enough for it to matter - because I’m a Blue. Much like Blues gravitate toward lottery professions, the Blue phenotype is a sort of “lottery ticket personality”: maybe you figure out how to split an atom or write The 1812 Overture, or maybe you end up penniless with syphilis in a snow-filled gutter at 30. There’s obviously variation - almost nobody is a “pure Blue” or “Pure Red” - and I am gravely weighing out the feasibility of giving the Red template my most sincere try, but certainly the bimodal distribution is real.
I understand why you loathe Blues so much. At the historical moment in which we live, they’ve been able - through what I consider egregious subterfuge and bad faith - to artificially inflate their own power over Red, throwing the Babble & Prune machine wildly out of balance, and now they’re presenting a very real threat of trying to turn your kids Blue and trying to destroy what you hold dear. Trying to take the outside view, though, I think it remains true that neither Blue nor Red can destroy each other without destroying themselves in the process.
Uh, you can totally have a society without blue types. It would have much worse art and much less innovation, but it would work. Because the things that make civilization work are by definition things that we already know how to do, which the red types are good at.
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Happy to serve.
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er, clearly hoffmeister and some of the alt-right believe that e.g. the libs and (for the alt-right) jews are both very smart (given both technical achievements and cultural influence) and wrong.
... both the alt-right and probably hoffmeister value "hard work" and "being a good father". Did this idea come from the left accusing people of being racist, and racism is a "think and feel" instead of a "behavior"? But "blue tribe morality" prescribe plenty of behaviors such as giving to the poor (note all the blue-tribe charitable foundations).
The value of being a 'good man' is always something though! "Being a hard worker" is valuable in that that work produces something useful for people. "Being a good father" is valuable in that it helps raise children! If you're 'being a good father' in a way that isn't helping a child, or "working hard" as a MLM marketer, you're not actually "being good". (this suggests that "being good" isn't an informative statement itself, that one needs to point to the actual thing being done). Those people are saying that the thing you're doing isn't actually accomplishing the thing you're claiming it is.
Unless I'm failing badly to understand you (which is possible), you seem to have completely failed to grasp the point @HlynkaCG is making here. No, things like working hard or being a good father aren't valuable because they produce good things. They are valuable in and of themselves. Even if you live on an island by yourself, working hard is good. Even if you knew for a fact that your children would die tomorrow, doing your best to raise them today is good.
You seem to be doing this thing I see a lot in this forum, where consequentialists advance a consequentialist argument for a virtue and think that they have understood their interlocutors' thinking. But every time I see that it's incorrect, because the consequentialists fail to grasp that their interlocutor simply does not care about the consequences as a reason for doing good things.
I don't agree with everything that @HlynkaCG said (for example, I do think that you can be a moral failure and still have true and valuable insights about other areas of life), but he's spot on about one thing. The reason to be a good man (or woman) isn't because it gets you anything. It just doesn't matter if you lose some culture war, or even a real war, because you stuck to your principles. What matters is that you stuck to your principles.
I'm directly arguing against that point. Also, I know I'm carelessly trampling all over hundreds of years of vigorously debated philosophy, and this is a massive tangent, but it seems to be a big part of hiynka's issue with blue-tribers.
What is working hard, and what is being a good father? These ideas are derived from attempts to benefit society or one's kin, or accomplish greatness, or something. If one looks at someone clicking away at league of legends, even if they're trying very hard to click, or someone who's working very hard at applying makeup properly to attract a mate - this isn't "hard work", because it's not benefitting society or yourself. Playing league or doing makeup well are somewhat mechanically challenging, take patience and knowledge, and aren't obviously less so than working as a janitor. The only thing that really distinguishes someone 'hard at work' on a tough, soft task like writing, from someone lazily arguing on the internet, are the usefulness, or interestingness, of the output! Same goes for 'being a good father' - what makes a "good father" still requires the """consequentialist""" judgement of what actually benefits the child! If a father, to benefit their child, feeds them bleach to "clean out parasites" ... are they being a good father? No. Replace bleach with ivermectin, assuming the right kind of parasite, and yes. Similarly if instead of bleach, it's 1700 and the child is fed some poisonous healing brew that isn't "obviously bad" in society's eyes. Saying these particular categories are "valuable in and of themselves" still makes most of the same consequentialist value judgements, with all the latent complexity, just hidden behind socially-claimed sanction.
The idea is - i think - if you care about consequences over 'process', then you become corrupted by power / unrestrained / an evil leftist, and therefore, the argument goes, forget about the actual good things - i.e. consequentialistly pursuing "lots of good people" turns you into the progressive EA who forgets about his children and community. And to avoid this, we'll say "there are Goods - real moral actions you need to follow, that you can't reason around"! The problem is this still posits various ... good things, that are, purely observationally, justified by their consequences (your children and family are unhappy, your society collapses from deracination and lack of purpose), which are the 'principles you need to stick to' - but the complexity of causation means you can lose those goods too! The person 'sticking to their principles' is doing so because they're arguing those principles do maintain the children and family and society in a way the consequentialist doesn't, and that the progressive consequentialist, by abandoning them, gets confused or corrupted by power and forgets what's good - the issue is that saying 'there is a Good' doesn't make the goals of said 'Goods' go away - the children and society still physically exist, it's still worth actually helping your child, and when that conflicts with your list-of-virtuous-actions and you follow the Virtuous Action and your child learns less or your society collapses, nothing was gained! And progressives aren't failing because they forgot to follow the restrained-list-of-goods and were too rational, it's because they genuinely believe different values are Good and follow those!
But those principles are clearly and obviously there to achieve certain ends! If you follow your principle of "working hard" but your hard work is as an accountant in the Progressive Eugenics Department - or what if you're a subcontractor, and you just work at Ernst & Ernst, you just happen to notice you're doing accounting for the PED - or you are a "good father" in that you indoctrinate your child into the Blue Tribe, like the rest of your community does ... and how can you even know this isn't "working hard" or "being a good father" without tracing out the physical consequences of those actions?
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