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It's increasingly seemed to me that progressivism is uniquely unmoored from any guiding set of principles. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it seems unambiguously true to me that racism is bad unless it's against white people, sexism is bad unless it's against men, prejudice is bad unless it's against a group you don't like. I mean there is a strong correlation between someone identifying themselves as an ardent opponent of prejudice and racism with those who use the term 'white' as an insult to describe something they don't like. I just moved to new york, and am also from the south, and I'm astonished at the degree to which the most progressive people will talk about the south and southerners as if they're inherently inferior and will demonstrate an oddly aggressive and blatant prejudice against them, even if they've never been there. And what's crazy is it's so damn overt and explicit that you don't even need to really peel back layers of thought to identify the prejudice; they're not entirely against outright claiming that they're prejudiced against those from the south as if it's a badge of honor and will absolutely shit on it despite having never been there. And the hypocrisy is never really acknowledged. I say this not necessarily as an insult but as an observation: but progressivism genuinely does not appear to be guided by any sort of principle and intellectually the mechanics of it seem to be extremely sloppy, despite the fact that they have insinuated them into the foundations of collective thought to a unique degree.
I find progressivism, in academia in particular, to have become so consumed by ideology laid upon layers of other ideology for so long that there is such a profound and massive removal from the practical realities of things. They are so far removed from simply observing and assessing what is happening at a real level that it seems like for any discussion of any observation, the conversation must address everything except what's evidently going on. If the understanding isn't rooted in this conception of highly intellectualized frameworks and systemic structures it's considered to be invalid. There is such a consumption with systems-level thinking. The mechanism by which they seem to maintain this influence seems to be the reference of these vague and intellectualized approaches that, by their abstract nature, can't really be decisively refuted (meaning you can't really prove that a given structural characteristic doesn't exist because you can't really prove that it does exist either) and to disagree with them is to convey that you are not enlightened and missed that day in school when we learned of the these structures and frameworks with a clarity and obviousness that can only be matched by learning of the laws of physics.
I certainly don't want to spare the republican party any very well deserved condemnation, but I don't find that criticism to be particularly lacking right now, nor do I think they have the norm-setting capabilities to be as relevant to me.
The topic of casual, vitriolic, comically uninformed bigotry about southerners in other parts of the country is actually a really fascinating topic in its own right, and something I might wade into here some day when I'm less strapped for time, because it actually touches on some really interesting and fascinating challenges America will face soon, as the South continues to grow in economic and population strength relative to the North East and the West Coast.
If you wrote it I'd read it. I just read an article from Bloomberg that said the southeastern corridor (or something like that) just surpassed the northeast in terms of contribution to GDP, those from the northeast continue to leave for the south, as do businesses, and as a result the south's representation in congress is growing. I wasn't aware of the prejudice, which is sometimes just outright hostility, against southerners prior to moving up north recently, so I can't be sure if it's just a frustrated response to their diminishing importance or has always been there. But I do find it fascinating and odd to see a group slowly losing its prominence to another group it views itself as superior to, despite the deeply engrained nature of that superiority. Like the roots of that superiority are starting to decay but the flower doesn't realize it yet.
I think you'd get a lot out of the following article - https://www.ecosophia.net/hate-new-sex/
That's a blog written by a prominent astrologer. Even if I agree with what they're saying I just can't view it with credibility.
I mean check out this line from his wiki "He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics."
"He criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy" I mean fucking christ
If you don't like occultism or things influenced by it, what are you doing on the rationalist side of the internet? Did you somehow miss all the references to the kabbalah in Scott's work? He even directly mentions in one of his articles on Slatestarcodex that he has a lot of friends who are practicing occultists. If you're going to judge people based on an interest in the occult, you're going to have to throw Scott Alexander out with the bathwater too. For the record I think that if you actually listen to Greer speak on those topics he's eminently reasonable, but I'm not going to try to convince you.
Either way, I don't understand why you think that an author has to be judged by the entirety of their work as summarised by wikipedia. There are plenty of people who I trust in some domains but not in others, and I often find that even people I disagree with strongly on important issues can produce compelling works of writing. I don't agree with everything Friedrich Nietzsche said and I definitely think that Plato got some things wrong too, but that doesn't mean I can't recognise the quality of their work and get something out of it.
We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.
I don't think that's a particularly good metric. You're tossing out almost the entirety of human culture - you're throwing away Plato, Isaac Newton... hell, you're tossing just about the entirety of pre-Renaissance cultural output into the bin. Moreover, I view a lot of modern beliefs as having substantially less truth-value in them than astrology or magic - say what you will about astrology, but it produces less incorrect information than modern social justice theories, antiracist activism and a decent chunk of both libertarian and communist ideology. The fact that a lot of insightful and compelling writers believe in nonsense like tabula rasa doesn't mean that they can't produce great work in other areas.
i wouldn't consider that standard to apply to people like Plato, Newton etc. They were just around at a different time, which just didn't have the same level of understanding of the world, so a lot of ideas and thoughts about the world were given room to be elevated. I'm not going to fault someone for not knowing space is a vacuum when they lived thousands of years before we went to space, for instance. Just like I'm not going to fault someone for believing something wrong about the spread of disease prior to the invention of germ theory.
I would agree with what you're saying about things like social justice, antiracism etc. But those are really low quality modes of thought. Exceeding that standard, which I'm not sure astrology does but it's certainly not substantially below that standard, does not lend credibility. That's not good company to be in.
Also disagree that a writer should be regarded as being capable of producing great work in one area and nonsense in another. If those areas are substantially different, that's one thing. And there are always exceptions to the rule. But in analyzing the world, if they indulge in nonsense that's a good indicator that their critical thinking abilities and abilities to discern the true nature of things are probably fairly weak.
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