domain:academic.oup.com
stav
15m ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
Hyperion
15m ago
There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.
There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.
It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
BahRamYou
24m ago
I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel exactly the same way as you, that it's all just a gigantic tower of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism using big words to intimidate normies while not actually proving anything. Other times I think... there might something to this. I think the way it's supposed to work is like a big aggressively-growing business. They can't possibly explain the entire market/all of society, and they know there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Still, they do their best to make a coherent plan, and muddle along through, and as long as it's more right than it is wrong it will make progress. It's a way to deal with incredibly difficult problems that are just too massive to handle in a simple, rigorous, step-by-step "scientific" way.
But that does allow for a lot of bullshit to get through too... it's hard to tell!
NelsonRushton
33m ago
In some ways, the tweet is not wrong.
I think the tweet is dead wrong. It makes a claim of fact, that is a universal generalization, that is not true, and that is not usefully close to being true.
OliveTapenade
48m ago
By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.
I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.
As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.
Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.
Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?
hydroacetylene
55m ago
Nullification itself is what is so good for Abbott politically; telling the federal government to beat it makes him look strong and that makes people rally around the flag. His actual culture war policies are a bit more popular in Texas than nationally, but not my that much.
Joe Biden is not going to send the troops in to escort male athletes into the high school girl's locker room in an election year.
Are you sure about this? A huge portion of the dem activist base would cream their pants at the thought of doing this, and the white house is run by that base.
The fact that this administration already pulled out a title IX rewrite that enforces an extremist doctrine no liberal would have endorsed until a few months ago should be a sign that they are not motivated by what wins votes.
The transsexual issue is the ultimate expression of pure power dragging the party by the hair behind it, down to the fleshing table in the basement.
The operative part of Title IX is
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
It is possible, though unlikely, that the Supreme Court will find that a large part of the enormous edifice of regulation hung off of this simple statement is a violation of the major questions doctrine. It is more likely that specific regulations will be struck down as having no statutory basis. But if the regulations are upheld, there's no way nullification will be accepted.
100ProofTollBooth
1hr ago
I am this demographic.
Political consciousness came online after college as a Reganite conservative. Realized there were some contradictions there but, more importantly, that the rot started far earlier. Progress to a William F. Buckley conservative and am now at the Willmoore Kendall level.
And am tradcath.
There is no "promised land" of small-c conservatism in the US. There is no city or state aside from maybe Idaho / Wyoming that is truly conservative all the way thru (and those I just listed have actually taken the libertarian blackpill). This is not to say it's a Lost Cause (is this the Jubal Early forum?!). The mission of small-c conservatives right now is pretty much lawfare. And, looking at SCOTUS and the legacy of Mitch McConnell, it's actually going damn well. Then again, the reaction to Dobbs has shown that America is so used to elective abortion that it doesn't actually want to give it up, despite posturing to the contrary. This is even more true with social spending and direct cash transfers.
On a social level, tradcath communities are real, vibrant, and actually growing especially among the Youths. The problem is internecine conflict. Some Gen-Z tradcaths are trying to be "more catholic than the Pope." YouTube Catholics seem to be largely YouTube first, Catholic second. The Pope himself ... well ... Jesus. The positive side is that it truly is a durable community. Moms (and Dads) routinely group babysit, there's always a potluck or sort of open dinner thing happening, people trade tips on schools, make business deals and connections, plan vacations together. A parish with a strong tradcath element (a giveaway is at least one Traditional Latin Mass per week) actually uses the Church building itself as a center for community instead of "spooky once a week lecture hall." This can all be done with relative ease because everyone is already one hundred percent bought in to a shared understanding of the True essence of morality, existence, and God. So, yeah, social trust levels are high. I do sometimes enjoy thinking about progressive families coming face to face with a playdate situation in which they have to think, "holy shit, I don't actually know anything about how this other family views the world, and I'm giving them my child for an afternoon." The kayfabe of "respect all backgrounds" disappears real quick.
The issue of concern both with small c-conservatism and American tradcaths is that we fail to avoid becoming fatalist crusaders. It's actually not that big of a deal to be a permanent minority so long as we can self-preserve (read: tradcaths babies on one hand, and politicians from rural states that have a structural advantage in the Senate on the other - even if those states are actually libertarian in concept). I do worry that there's a temptation to borrow from the Snake Handler Pentecostals and the Massive Resistance Southern Democrats to go on a campaign of self-immolation just to show how righteous we are.
A side bet for you: I would expect enrollment at small Catholic colleges (note: not seminaries, just explicitly catholic affiliated / run colleges) to spike for a few years.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1hr ago
It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year
Does he need a replacement? If Trump stays on the same side, at least with respect to the culture war, then there won't be anything he does that Texas would feel the need to nullify. Any overreaches of Presidential authority that Trump makes will probably be in favor of the right and against the left. At which point left-leaning states may try to pull the same stunt using these incidents as inspiration/justification. But as far as Texas is concerned they'll probably just cheer on whatever he does as something they were doing anyway or would like to do.
Tomato
1hr ago
My Korean wife seems 100% unaware of this but in her defense she spends most of her online time-wasting reading about domestic drama on a Korean coupon-clipping forum and a Korean credit card churning forum.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
As an actual IRL tradcath my understanding is that WELS, ROCOR Orthodox, and certain greek-catholic groups whose membership often overlaps with latin-mass groups anyways are the closest sociological analogues to traditional Catholicism(which is growing and does have staying power even if it's overstated). Maybe add Opus Dei too if you count them as a group. At @2rafa 's point about a possible inherent leftward drift- the SSPX is by far the oldest major tradcath group and also tends to be the most moderate on hot-button issues, despite having an uberconservative reputation, with the SSPX supporting things like old-earth instead of young-earth creation, knuckle under and get the covid vax if you have truly no other option, accepting longer periods of dating before marriage, etc. Now that could also just be because of having relatively fewer Americans in top positions making it less firmly red-tribe aligned, also, it's not inherently less conservative to believe you should get the covid vaccine if your employer won't accept any religious exemptions or that the earth might be as much as 30,000 years old.
Tomato
1hr ago
And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.
It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.
I may be an extreme outlier in this but I’ve met, hooked up with, and dated a lot of women (and eventually married one) from dating apps and both me and the women I met for the most part regarded the experience as fun and rewarding. I’m close friends with a couple of my former partners and we’re all happy about it. It was not appreciably worse than meeting women in person. This was mostly in the Bay Area so maybe it’s an unrepresentative market for how good online dating is/bad in person dating is. I’d be happy to keep hooking up with bumble chicks if I hadn’t met my wife.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.
He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.
Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.
No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.
Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Monkeys are routinely trained to work. They're used to pick coconuts in Thailand and I think a few other crops in more isolated instances, but they tend to be awful thieves and like to attack people as far as I know.
Agricultural labor- particularly fruit picking- also has a large amount of seasonal variation and most farmers prefer the flexibility of questionably-legal migrant labor to having to feed hundreds of mischievous and herpes ridden primates that get animal welfare folks all up in your business.
fartVader
1hr ago
Experts without specific takes are the worst bunch. If Modi hating is your full-time job, then have your attacks honed to perfection. These 'everything is horrible' articles are exhausting and teach you nothing.
"India's is doing badly because Modi......" Come on, keep going. Modi how ? What specific policies did Modi enact that ruined the economy ? What alternatives does the opposition propose that will fix the economy ?".
IMO, This article correctly points out the main challenges to economic development in India.
(quotes from the article)
In private many businesses still complain about India’s complex tax regulation, difficulties in acquiring land, rigid labour laws, weak intellectual property enforcement and clogged courts. It takes almost four years to enforce contracts in business disputes, among the slowest globally, according to the World Bank.
Simplifying tax laws means consolidating the tax code at the national level. States see this as a powergrab and Modi gets termed a fascist.
Judicial reform requires parlimentary inference in the indepdendent judiciary. Democracy watchers view this as a powergrab and Modi gets termed a fascist.
Non-BJP states have among the strongest labor protections in the nation (Delhi, WB, Kerala, Bihar, ex-UP, ). When BJP regains control, it tries to weaken them. Ofc, he gets called a corporate sell out.
Modi is public about his desire for India to have a market-based, private sector-driven economy,” he said. “But this view is not shared by much of the opposition and even the nativist wing of his own party
Modi has many failings. I would be sympathetic towards the opposition if they agreed with informed economists on Modi being too-left wing. Instead, critics of Modi call every pro-market move fascist and his political opposition encourages dragging India back to Nehruvian-era socialist isolationism.
To avoid being hypocritical, here are his specific failings from my perspective.
Lack of eggs (protien) in school diets
India is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, below North Korea and above Afghanistan.
India uniquely underperforms on child wasting. The reason goes back to 1970s and the introduction of the wheat, rice & simple carb heavy diets post green-revolution. Under-nourishment is low because because peopel get sufficient calories. However, the lack of protien causes child-wasting.
Indian farm laws massively subsidize wheat, rice and simple carbs, and that's all poor families can afford. Modi tried to fix this by removing grains-specific subsidies in the 2019 farm-bill. This bill recieved massive push-back from opposition and the elite global left for being anti-farmer. Under pressure, Modi's revoked the bill. This was his first mistake.
We need more eggs in school lunches. More protein. Modi hasn't done anything towards this, neither has anyone else.
Demonetization
Demonetization (2017) was a disaster. It is known. That being said, the article primarily focuses on post-covid recovery (or lack there off). India's economy is in a recent (2023-24) rut. I don't have an answer to what recent change has caused this.
Unsufficient progress on ease of doing business
Land acquisition
Modi has failed to pass the land acquisition bill over 2 terms. It has been touted as the biggest impediment to doing business in India. Modi claims he will bring the reforms in during a 3rd term. But he had a big-enough mandate from 2019-2024. The reason for this failure, was due to global and national pressure because the bill was percieved as anti-farmer.
Judicial reform
The slow moving judiciary is the 2nd biggest impediment to doing business in India. India's judiciary is full independent, so the Govt. doesn't have much power here. Afaik, there is massive resistance to any Judicial reform by the Modi govt. So both sides continue to be in an uncomfortable marraige, while cases pile on.
Simpler tax codes
Modi hasn't exactly failed here. It is more so that he hasn't pushed enough. GST was implemented, good. It remains unpopular among the opposition, the left and the global elite. But, he got it through However, other campaign promises remain in 'draft' phase... Overall, I find this to be an insufficient reform. Good start, but taxation remains insanely complex.
Overall, I remain cautiously bullish on India.
From a resource standpoint, it is agriculturally self-sufficient, has an incredible appetite for solar power and has an adequate water supply. Societally, it has strong family structures, a commitment to education and a stable fertility rate. You can't underestimate the long term benefits of this.
Some tax reform, eggs and weaker labor laws should keep India over water for the next decade. If the ease of doing business genuinely improves, then we might just be in for a bumber decade.
If India misses this decade of population-pyramid perfection, then we're FUCKED big time.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
man this sounds weird out of context. I had to double check that that's a real place.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
And in that way, it's really no different than the Vietnam protesters who shared the same elite characteristics. As early as 1966 Normal Mailer noted how the protestors were upper class while the policemen they fought were working class.
Indeed, actual working class protestors around the Vietnam war were sometimes allowed by the police to rough up the hippies far worse than the cops ever would.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
And indeed there are historical examples of backlash moving society against liberalizing trends; that's what the famously strict Victorian norms came from. Both the 50s baby boom and the 90s mini-baby boom might also be arguable examples, but I think economic factors dominated there.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Is Nullification on the Horizon?
Recently the Biden admin rewrote some regulations to encode gender identity in title IX. While this is stupid, it's not something that in itself seems likely to be a productive motte top level post. Ken Paxton sued the white house over it, but this is just the default assumption about federal administrative rules on culture war topics. No, what I'm getting at is the letter from Greg Abbott:
Dear President Biden: Title IX was written by Congress to support the advancement of women academically and athletically. The law was based on the fundamental premise that there are only two sexes—male and female. You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they were girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity. This ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX exceeds your authority as President.
I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate. Your rewrite of Title IX not only exceeds your constitutional authority, but it also tramples laws that I signed to protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting men from competing against female athletes. Texas will fight to protect those laws and to deny your abuse of authority.
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/O-BidenJoseph1.pdf
I guess telling the federal government to kick rocks back in January and getting away with it set a precedent- and, obviously, Joe Biden is not going to send the troops in to escort male athletes into the high school girl's locker room in an election year.
This obviously raises the question- are we on the cusp of an era where big state governors feel free to resist the federal government? Obviously, being combative with the Biden admin is a political winner for Greg Abbott. It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year; I don't think he thinks he can get away with bullying New or old Mexico but the strongman image requires something. And, of course, are Ron Desantis and Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul watching closely and learning? Will they resist Trump policies as brazenly(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance) as Abbott does Biden's, given that he's emboldened by a base which may not be pro-secession but is absolutely confident Texas would be fine if it did happen?
Under any definition of the time when the Bible was being written, "day" did not mean "actually hundreds of millions of years". Anyone saying otherwise is coping. Genesis is literally supposed to be how the world came about, and people interpreted it this way and believed it for hundreds of years until the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism came about.
Is God supposed to be a loving God, as almost every Christian I see says it, or is he supposed to be literally the most wicked thing in existence, with Satan and every other false god paling in comparison both to the magnitude of cruelty he is capable of inflicting and the willingness to see it carried out? When you pick apples, you keep the good ones and toss the bad ones. You don't take the bad apples, smash them into bits, reconstitute them, and smash them again and keep repeating this same pattern. That doesn't make any sense. You know what would make it make sense? If humans came up with it to scare you into believing it.
Edit to add: The idea that you can handwave away the unfairness of that is kind of infuriating to me. You're telling me that a kid can be born in a nowhere town with no opportunity, grow up getting abused by his parents, reach ripe adulthood somewhere after 12, lose faith in God because nothing good is happening to him, and end up shooting himself, and he goes to Hell to be tormented forever. Not only was life unfair to him, but also the afterlife was even more unfair to him, somehow. There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving. That's pretty unequivocally horrible. God created every part of this situation -- a cruel world, the rules behind entry to Heaven and Hell, the ability to sin and feel pain. What majesty would do that?
In some ways, the tweet is not wrong. Protesters at elite universities will be tomorrow's leaders. They will be on the "right" side of the history not because they are morally right, but because they will be able to shape history to their whims.
The Ivy League protests are not a street movement, they are an elite rebellion.
And in that way, it's really no different than the Vietnam protesters who shared the same elite characteristics. As early as 1966 Normal Mailer noted how the protestors were upper class while the policemen they fought were working class.
Sadly, these benighted and often mentally ill children are our future leaders. They will no doubt treasure the memories of their "rebellion" in 30 years as they sit comfortably inside the halls of power.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.
OK but the two philosophers you cite are both dead, who social science is really a different field. I thought we were talking about humanities and continental philosophy here? Do you just want to dismiss literally all of modern humanities as nonsense?
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