71–80 of 138 posts
This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago. What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful. These days I think JREG is doin…
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Yes, it describes everyone who aims to use unrestrained political power to reshape society, i.e. the precise opposite of what "conservatism" actually means.
No, not necessarily. Conservatives condone social engineering as long as it agrees with their beliefs; e.g., to promote specific religions, and heteronormativity. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism#Beliefs_and_princ... I think you are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_conservatism
Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
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I'm not sure I agree here. There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them. What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked. "You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using thos…
"Woke" is perhaps the freaking platonic ideal of what this article criticizes. I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?" And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right…
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No, not necessarily. Conservatives condone social engineering as long as it agrees with their beliefs; e.g., to promote specific religions, and heteronormativity. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism#Beliefs_and_princ... I think you are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_conservatism
Nothing in Russel Kirk's concept of conservatism implies any of the specific policy positions you're attributing to conservatism per se. Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
Conservatives believe that the status quo may violate the transcendent order and that they are duty bound to restore it. Neither conservatives nor liberals believe the status quo is sacred.
Do you think the rolling back of Roe vs. Wade was not a conservative act because it was a "status quo norm" ? They never liked it, so perhaps it was not a norm?
Status quoism is different from conservatism.
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The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment. IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have e…
> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration? > but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, “Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence. > gets called "conservative" despite its po…
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Modern US mainstream politics have become weirdly like the ancient Roman "Green" versus "Blue" political parties that evolved out of chariot racing fan clubs. No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government, just blind support for your chosen side's leaders. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...
> No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government > just blind support for your chosen side's leaders. These are two different questions. I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies. Even if they did, it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans. Each of the two major US parties have al…
It's something extremely important, along with "underlying theory of government" which you missed to address. If you think boundless inconsistency and shapeshifting are OK, you better say it straight - if you don't, you need a theory of bounds and it better be consistent.
> it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans.
That's upside down, in fact, 99% of Americans adopt a selection from the views offered by politicians and parties as reflected by the media. The "diverse political views" don't fall from the sky, they are products of the political system.
> Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests... [ consistent, stable views are just pretense ] when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
You are conflating "coalitions of interests" with "political views", they are quite different. In order to start a discussion we must separately and clearly define the coalitions, their interests and their political views: if they aren't consistently defined, neither accountability nor even basic security can be achieved.
If interests are a sufficient reason for dishing out pretense pseudo-rationality, then the coalition that is best at pretending and manages to accumulate a critical mass of power will simply enslave those who were gullible to believe them. I shouldn't have to explain this in America but here I am.
This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago. What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful. These days I think JREG is doin…
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Me, of course. (I mean that somewhat ironically - everybody would say that it fits them. But I also mean it somewhat sincerely.)
Well, I was mainly referring to politicians and other prominent persons. I'm not denying that anonymous individuals exist who have remained consistent over the decades, but they don't seem to have much power anymore.
I’m starting to think political definitions only have use as propaganda. Definitions are definite, yet political definitions are anything but. In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask. The point, I think, is sim…
I'm not sure I agree here. There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them. What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked. "You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using thos…
Fascist is a very concrete definition, as it is a comparison to a concrete existing historical movement. It's kind of the same as with Nationalsocialists. It is a term for a very concrete party, but is sometimes used as a slur.
Try "Obsolescence of all Definitions" Tom Givon used to say in class: "What true language requires a dictionary?" Language is decontextualized in the West, it's about attributes of individual objects where simplifying laws are derived, rather than language used as interdependent. At a certain point arbitrary language dissolves into meaninglessness. That's entropy and arbitrariness. As we accelerate language and prima…
"Mathematics is what mathematicians study. Mathematicians are those who study mathematics."
