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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Honestly, it would be good for everyone if nobody voted. The reason that neo-liberalism must be so careful to purge society of crimethink is because we vote. I don’t think that all efforts for propaganda would stop, but the volume and ubiquity of culture war propaganda would vastly decrease if it didn’t matter so much that I personally sign off on various issues. Ukraine could fade into the background and I could call their capitol whatever I wanted. I could believe whatever I wanted to about transgender issues without worry about the elites or their lackeys trying to thought-police me to death. There might well be limits to this, but at least the volume, the fear, would be turned down.
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
If this is true, why did the lack of representation for the working classes occasion such dissatisfaction in, say, nineteenth century Britain? The failure of what would become the First Reform Act in 1832 brought Britain if not actually to the brink of revolution then certainly to an acute crisis, over a bill that only expanded the franchise a little. The meeting of the BPU in that crisis supposedly brought out 200,000 people, an astonishing figure considering that it exceeded the entire population of Birmingham. These were people with far less time and energy to devote to political causes than most of today's people, yet they did so anyway, because they knew how important representation was.
True of course, but then the working classes still came out in support of it; they at least cared about something. And it's hardly like working class agitation for enfranchisement stopped in 1832; 1867, 1884 and 1918 didn't come from nowhere.
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Because of laws about how you are required to treat other people (and how other people get to treat you or your children) based on their genitalia. And those laws won't go away if we abolish voting.
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I’m not sure that the PRC has less propaganda than the Anglosphere…
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…perhaps. Notable non-democratic states of the last century were pretty famous for their wide ranging propaganda. Totalitarianism, of course, was not a system that involved voting.
Plenty of authoritarian leaders who don’t believe in any particular ideology have used mass propaganda: arguably all of Idi Amin, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mobutu, Trujillo, Videla; a lot of Nicaraguan leftists seem to think Ortega is a faker, etc.
But unless I’m reading the comment wrong, the OP doesn’t seem to be talking about the elites at all, but about how propaganda is used on normal people. If propagandizing is the same (or worse) even when the elites have completely different motivations and governing structures, this is much my point. It’s true there are big qualitative differences, but they move in the direction of more propaganda the farther we get from our own democratically elected, self-interested, incurious rulers. If the argumentative is that democracy is the root problem, that trendline has to be grappled with.
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Maybe not loads worse, but I find it hard to believe that it would be a good thing for governance. Did their 'ancestors a few hundred years ago' do much better? Not really, after all the last British monarch who in my estimation was truly active, George III, is best known in that regard for dismissing Pitt for having the temerity to support Catholic emancipation. Brilliant.
In any case, in Britain it was really Parliament that was master of the country at the latest from 1688 onwards. Was pre-1688 Britain notably better governed than after that time? No, surely the opposite is true.
Obviously true but also not necessarily relevant. Sure, members of the Commons were only seeking the votes of a very small section of the population, and many seats were not seriously contested, but nevertheless many were at least seeking the votes of an electorate, and an electorate that by modern standards was probably pretty ignorant in 1688, say. The few constituencies where the franchise was quite large and something approaching the ordinary person did get to vote even pre-1832, Westminster standing out as a notable example, hardly returned worse candidates than the average. Westminster yielded Hobhouse, Burdett and most famously of course Charles James Fox.
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I’m not sure it would, if only because the monarchs would inherit largely functional institutions built by their democratic successors. But to speak for the normie constituency: since the last time the nobility was in power their countries were quite a bit poorer and more war-prone, is there a reason you think they would do an equal/better job than moderns? I feel like an active case has to be made here.
Wrt democracy making people care about politics, most non-democratic countries still invest quite a bit into propagandizing their populations and demand even louder and more public affirmations of political views. Maybe this is because centuries of democratic examples have changed the way you have to govern citizens anywhere, maybe the information age just changes the way you have to keep control of a population, maybe increased urbanization just means rebellious commoners are a much more concentrated threat - either way that genie is likely not going back into the bottle.
Strong monarchies exist today- if we exclude oil states, we get Morocco and probably Malaysia, neither of them war prone, Liechtenstein and Monaco- both of which have higher standards of living than their surroundings, although they’re tiny micro states- Tonga- which doesn’t seem notably worse off than democracies in Polynesia, despite the instability of its leaders on a personal level- Swaziland- which is a shithole and may not have had any way to avoid being a shithole- and Bhutan- which is simply strange.
Notably, these are all constitutional monarchies with full parliaments.
The Malaysian king doesn’t do a ton of day-to-day governance, parliament handles the actual show. Even his role in recent years of playing a part in selecting the Prime Minister (who actually leads the country) has been a historical anomaly they justified due to instability, and even his own position as monarch is semi-elected as a rotating representative from their different states.
Morocco’s king is a lot more powerful (even if parliament still plays a big part) but, idk, it’s still a mid tier country with a lot of poverty and dysfunction. None of these places, or even the old European monarchies, seem as nice and functional as your average liberal democracy.
The King of Morocco is pretty powerful, but I wouldn't consider him all that competent I guess? His powers are greatest in foreign policy and the judicial system, two areas where Morocco is notoriously bumbling. Notably, Morocco experiences pretty significant population outflows of Moroccans leaving each year to try and live under liberal democracies. The leaders of Bhutan and Oman are competent (or at least bin Said was, I don't know much about his successor) but their countries are also poor. Even adding in the rest of the oil states, most achieve pretty middling GDP per capita and HDI scores.
Liechtenstein and Monaco do have extremely high living standards, but neither are anywhere near absolutist. Liechtenstein is a literal direct democracy - the princely powers you describe of vetoing referendums were vested in the monarch by a public vote in 2003 (notably the monarchy did not have these powers when Liechtenstein achieved its own huge takeoff growth) and those powers can be taken away by the public at any time as well, as they considered doing and rejected in the 2012 referendum. They can even vote him fully out of power whenever they want, and he has no power to veto (that was part of the deal for increasing his powers in 2003). For what it counts, I have no personal objection to people voting in a powerful executive like this, or in France or wherever.
I don't know much about Monaco, but it's not really clear to me how powerful the Monacan Prince is beyond his veto power; they seem to have an elected parliament that makes all the laws, no? He can call for new elections, but so can Macron. He's described as "representing the country" in foreign affairs, but the Minister of Foreign Affairs seems to make all the actual calls. Should we even consider this a normal case? France literally handles their whole military defense.
By the same token, both Liechtenstein and Monaco are tax havens with populations under 40,000, both countries put together could easily fit on some college campuses. This feels a lot more objectionable to me than the petro-states. If I was arguing for the success of the liberal democratic model I don't think wildly successful Luxembourg would be a fair go-to example: it's circumstances are too unusual and probably don't scale to bigger countries.
This is part of why I thought the more useful comparison would be between the modern European nation state democracies and those same countries under their former monarchies, which tend to look quite a bit poorer and more likely to go to war.
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This would be my suspicion as well. A good chunk of the reason that past monarchs could do so much to protect and advance their kingdoms is that they’d been raised and trained to handle statecraft on a level that just doesn’t happen today. Most democratic societies train their leadership to appeal to the masses, to become electable, and to raise funds for re-election. The entire job of a typical politician is not governing but winning the election.
This is the biggest advantage on a monarchy— in a true (I.e not tourist attraction) monarchy, a prince would be trained from youth to understand and wield power and the ins and outs of statecraft. Read the advice given to rulers in any society, and the goal is to create a stable and prosperous society and to use power effectively. Charles III wasn’t trained that way, because no one anticipates that he’ll do anything important. His role as monarch is limited to keeping the tourists coming to the pomp and circumstance, greeting world leaders, and waving from balconies at various personal and national events. If handed the power Richard III had to remake the country in his own image, he doesn’t have the ability to do that because he’s only ever had ceremonial power.
…maybe, idk. For all that specialized training in statecraft they seemed to always be getting in silly wars. How effective was their education in raising a stable and prosperous society when they never achieved a fraction of the stability and prosperity we’ve seen under our low budget, smile-for-the-camera leaders?
Yup - weirdly, the dumb politicians who have to appeal to the morons have kept the world much less violent than the ones with divine right ever pulled off. Probably, because even worse, the most corrupt politicians in a democratic society, no matter their ideology so pick your poison, can't get close to the amount of wealth by percentage kings held.
Even Trump, whose been the most openly corrupt President in ways that an ideological President's I dislike intensely would've never dreamed of is still only, a possible billionaire in a world of many billionaires.
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Silly wars that never reached the level of liberal democracies' wars.
Would a silly war between 2 slightly different kind of Slavs over who owns this or that grey bog risk escalating to nuclear apocalypse in a world without liberal democracies?
Traditional monarchies never developed the terrifying weapons (missiles, bombers, toxic gasses, nukes, drones) that the industrial revolution enabled liberal democracies to concoct.
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