Is the situation in the US that insane or is he fighting strawmen strapped to windmills?
No. It isn't insane at all.
Heresy
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: Heresy
#812I think this is an important part: "Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would…
I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today? What people are finally noticing now is that non-government entities can also have negative impacts on free speech. They're not noticing because it just started -- e.g. lots of folks lost their jobs for…
> I like to point out the Sedition Act of 1918 here. About 100 years ago, a law that literally made it a crime to criticize the government was not only enacted, but upheld by the courts. Can you even imagine that today?
Only in banana republics like the USA. The patriot act went quite far in that direction
Re: Heresy
#813I don't read too much of PG's recent work. Does he attack classism with the same vigor as he does the left?
He's insanely detached from reality. Dude should not be making social commentary lol
Re: Heresy
#814The quotation about Isaac Newton was a poor choice for this essay as it was clearly allegorical about Newton himself . Even if you don’t know anything about the man, it should be clear from the claim that marriage might be a sin. In reality, the comment reflects four important things about Newton: 1 - marriage: he never married and once complained about someone trying to set him up with a woman; 2 - heresy: he was a…
I think it was just a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that he was a don, who don't marry.
Sure, though to be pedantic he wasn’t a Fellow during the period referred to by the quote.
Was there really a prohibition on marriage, or was that a side effect of dons being required to be priests (who in the CofE of course can marry). Interesting.
In general, restoration politics were weird.
Re: Heresy
#815Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It's just plain old tribalist hypocrisy: people Graham agrees with are encouraged to weaponize their victimization, while people he disagrees with are denied. First-degree intolerance (including but not limited to "x-ism") is acceptable…
> people Graham agrees with are encouraged to weaponize their victimization, while people he disagrees with are denied. Where do you get that from the original post? I am not seeing it.
People Graham agrees with who are encouraged to weaponize their victimization: those supposedly accused of "heresy" for their "x-ist" utterances.
People Graham disagrees with who are denied: those who speak out about "x-ist" utterances, whom he characterizes as "heretic hunters".
Re: Heresy
#816> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. I tried to recall the few times I called someone out on being sexist, racist or whatever, and it was never a discourse or a discussion: the majority were tasteless jokes in the presence of someone would have been affected (e.g. tasteless joke about how all women are $X in the presence of a wom…
It’s tempting to point out a few heresies. My hunch is that you’d err on the side of feeling uncomfortable. “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy, the way that clouds are telltale signs of a thunderstorm. I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my…
> and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
But this begs the question, doesn't it? Like the real answer is that
1. Lots of opinions were guarded or hushed or held closely even 20 years ago even in much of the western world (being trans or gay, being particularly nonreligious, socialism/communism/any kind of viewpoint left of Obama, all kinds of things about dating and sex, and more)
2. People weren't generally having discussions, or figuring things out with tens of thousands of listeners. Saying really dumb things because you don't actually know what you're talking about because you're a nonexpert is common and has been common forever. But people didn't start doing this until social media.
3. Things that were previously handled by whisper networks ("This professor says all kinds of wild racist shit", absolutely something said in my undergrad, and "this prof gives better grades to women who wear short skirts in the front row", something that absolutely was said in my parents undergrad) are now handled more openly and explicitly. This is probably a globally more optimal result, in that fewer people have to deal with sexual or racial harassment. But it also means that misunderstandings can blow up.
That's it, that's the issue.
Re: Heresy
#817My ultimate problem with all these heretics is that their heresies are ultimately just reactionary - There is a constant thread of the “good old days” and “in the past” and essentially their ideal is some past state.
It just feels a bit meh to me.
But perhaps that’s how all things are. I have a view which I think is heretical: I believe that banning organ trade is unethical and exploitative and that bringing organs to the market in a safe way is not only possible but required by us. I think it doesn’t fall into this fallacy because there is no time when this was considered except one year before NOTA passed. But perhaps you all think that is boring.
Re: Heresy
#818paulg, despite saying "There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left", immediately follows that with a fixation on the left:
"The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like."
We don't need to imagine. We're over a year into a wave of moral panic from the right focusing on local school boards in the united states, in which they seek to purge reading materials dealing with subjects that make them uncomfortable, fire people for raising those subjects, and impose rules against raising those subjects, in some cases carrying criminal penalties.
Looking over at Russia, we see the worst case scenarios Paul references in the esssay playing out quite explicitly, today. The example of how we'll know we're really in trouble ("Damn right we're banning ideas, and in fact here's a list of them") and the example of Mao saying "There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them"? Putin and his followers have already entered that territory [1] [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-protests.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.htmlRe: Heresy
#819The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and…
> I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. Would you mind giving me quotes from the post to back up these assertions?
Simply categorizing human beings as conventional vs unconventional and passive vs aggressive, and then establishing an enemy in one quadrant is an example. Unconventional people are the victims, aggressively conventional people are the others.
I think the thing Paul really has a problem with is social brigading and mobs attacking people unfairly. Which is fine; but you can make that argument without painting yourself or people like you as a victim. Otherwise you’re just using the same tactic mobs use.
We’re all guilty of this to different degrees because social media algorithms are finely-tuned to propagate outrage and we’re being conditioned to respond to and generate said outrage. I think the way out of the loop is to recognize this pattern and try to break it.
Re: Heresy
#820>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago
I see this sentiment expressed often to the point where it seems to just be accepted as true without the need to provide proof. Is anyone familiar with a methodology that attempts to examine this view with more rigor other than just, "boy it seems like more people are being cancelled these days"?