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Notes -
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.
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.
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?
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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