> At what point do you consider the listening process sufficient for conclusions to be drawn, or any other action to be taken At the point where you have sufficient evidence to charge them with "conspiracy to commit X", where X is a non-speech crime.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
One thing nobody seems to be putting a lot of attention on is how what he wrote was in a draft.
It was not sent, it was not finalized, it was a thought he laid down in what we can likely presume to be gmail and never hit send.
Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were clearly brutal. Nordic social democracy consciously set out to create a decent society for all and largely succeeded. I don't know what game the author is playing.
Nordic social democracy isn’t a utopian idea, though. It’s a progressive idea and an ambitious idea but it only really peeks out slightly from the normal range of market economies with welfare states, especially within Europe. Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.
Communism for all its faults was infinitely better than slavery and even a huge improvement over feudalism.
And Utopianism is the notion that perfection is attainable and perhaps even inevitable if you put enough enemies of the people against the wall.
The opposite of the authors viewpoint isn’t Utopianism (which is as extreme in the opposite direction) but pragmatism and realism. The fact that, flawed as we might seem, we are living in a reality that may not be possible to be more perfect.
Authoritarianism by definition requires a strong central power. Whatever you're talking about isn't authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism by definition requires a strong central power. This is one of the dishonest absolute tropes which need to be squashed, because it obscures the truth. It's an obfuscation that's as good as a lie. (1) Here's the universal, timeless truth: All power is temporary and contextual. All of history teaches us this. A masked mob dominating the street for a couple of hours clearly has contextual power. The mob…
Speech too is power contextually. So is monied interest. So is racial caregorization. So is voting. So is media control. So is historical distribution of resources. So is protest. So is enforcement of property law. Everything is politics, everything is power.
Personally, I think what you see in the world around you is a reaction by people who realized that they don't have power by money (and thus hardly any power by speech) and don't have power by demoray in a broken system stacked against them, and have resorted to whatever other forms of power are possible. And yet still the positions they fight for are ignored because the way they petition for them isn't the right way, ie, they way in which they can be disenfranchised and ignored.
I don't strongly disagree on any particular point, per se, but the fact that the author's thoughts are rooted in a religious worldview felt like it was snuck in there at the end: "Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed...The utopian visions that animate real places...seek to remake humanity and society in someone’s image—and that is not the image of the Creator." For further context, the website it…
From the article: Two key identifying marks of dystopia are social regimentation and an inevitable totalitarianism. "Conform or be cast out." --Rush, Subdivisions, Signals, 1982 "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." From the article: Next, dystopia is marked by dehumanization How one tweet can ruin your life | Jon Ronson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI From the article: The abuse…
> People who actually believe in those principles actually try to convince people, and when they can't convince, they listen.
While I agree with the rest, this is just naive. You cant convince those who are don't debate in good faith. You can defeat them or you can convince third parties, but trying to convince these is lost cause.
You cant change them, you can only change environment so that they cant cause much harm.
That’s a very religious view. At most you can say humans are not what you wish them to be. Where a crystal may have ‘defects’ that’s meaningless for a pile of sand. Further, defects can be more useful than a perfect crystalline structure. So, to say perfection is unobtainable requires a strict definition of perfection and absolute proof it’s impossible. Both, are very high hurdles.
> That’s a very religious view. Humans are not necessarily flawed Historically they have been. At least they're not up to our own standards. We can kill, lie, cheat, brutalize, exploit, each other, and we do so daily in the billions. We might not be total bastards, but we're no perfectly fine people either.
Flawed compared to what? Perfect meaning what? Humans are also infamous for never being content due to constantly shifting goalposts. The reason the religious can claim imperfection is they have an "existence proof" of perfection, but I am sceptical if such a proof exists.
Perhaps we can always improve and be better then we were. Which is a bit more of an optimistic statement.
There's a story in the news today about a Coast Guard lieutenant with extreme political views who was planning to go on an Anders Breivik style murder spree. Your model doesn't seem to include people who have zero interest in dialogue or persuasion and are willing to simply eliminate people they find disagreeable. Regrettably, it's not hard to find people who subscribe to eliminationist ideologies, and having found t…
Your model doesn't seem to include people who have zero interest in dialogue or persuasion and are willing to simply eliminate people they find disagreeable. I see this time and time again: Instead of engaging with dissenters, forums, groups of all kinds just evict people who are perfectly willing to talk. In principle, that's also acting to "simply eliminate people they find disagreeable." Often, it turns out that s…
Ok but if someone is just perfectly willing to talk about how Breivik is a hero and they wish more people would have the guts to do what he did it is of course not the same as actually doing what Breivik did but it seems sort of not worth talking to either, like if Breivik were the enemy of life they would be providing aid and comfort to the enemy without ever actually going out and shooting a bunch of people.
Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were clearly brutal. Nordic social democracy consciously set out to create a decent society for all and largely succeeded. I don't know what game the author is playing.
This. They are talking about "dystopia" and "utopia" which more or less mean "good"/"bad" society, it would be astonishing if any amoral (eg substantive) arguments could come out. Their conclusion (ie please don't be idealistic, it'll always lead to something bad) can be summarized as defending order, eg an institution that is legitimate per se. This kind of moral authoritarian argument is akin to the "do exclude violence", "don't promote radical ideas" (in the sense of largely differing from the status quo) and we long know that this rhetoric is used to elude the question of the frame of political confrontations, which is mostly what political negotiation should be about. Once the frame is set, the orientation is already fixed. I'm not about defending what we commonly refer to as revolutions (or more precisely insurrections), i'm just saying i don't believe institutions have any legitimacy per se and as such it is authoritarian conservatism to exclude critical thinking using moral arguments. The first and foremost rule of a democratic organization should be the "political (moral) license": being able to break the laws maintaining current order if you are about questioning it.
Authoritarianism by definition requires a strong central power. This is one of the dishonest absolute tropes which need to be squashed, because it obscures the truth. It's an obfuscation that's as good as a lie. (1) Here's the universal, timeless truth: All power is temporary and contextual. All of history teaches us this. A masked mob dominating the street for a couple of hours clearly has contextual power. The mob…
Speech too is power contextually. So is monied interest. So is racial caregorization. So is voting. So is media control. So is historical distribution of resources. So is protest. So is enforcement of property law. Everything is politics, everything is power. Personally, I think what you see in the world around you is a reaction by people who realized that they don't have power by money (and thus hardly any power by…
> don't have power by money (and thus hardly any power by speech)
That would sound much more convincing if it wasn’t for the fact that most media and academia is dominated by the Left (which is far more authoritative these days).