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Heresy

paulgraham.com

701–710 of 1001 posts

Re: Heresy

#701
post #417

By reading comments here it seems like racists and sexists think this blog is written with intent to support their agendas. I wish PG clearly spell out that is not ok to say that other people are less of a human. And with “heresy” he meant “vax mandates”, “gun control” and other general issues. I’m ok dicusssing gun control, taxes, etc. but I (and anybody I know) are really not ok when somebody says “evolution does n…

> I (and anybody I know) are really not ok when somebody says “evolution does not end at neck”. Given how often Claire Lehmann and her coterie show up as a reviewer of his essays and their Twitter interactions with Graham, it's easy to figure out he's talking about exactly such a statement.

And Claire Lehmann seems to be anti-gay and anti-transgender?

I was not aware who that person was but by reading her blog posts it seems to be way too anti-gay and racist to be considered serious.

Re: Heresy

#702

I 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Regardless of whether one agrees, I had to smile at this, because it is simply a more formal way of saying 'OK, boomer'

Re: Heresy

#703
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here Yeah this bothered me. His stance on this seems so defensive and personal and he gives very few examples of heretical ideas. It makes this essay more of a boomer diatribe than anything else imo.

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Not even 500px away from here, there's this exchange from you, contradicting your clever tweet:

> Can [ignoring ideas I don't like] get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?

> If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them. [Context: "We do not show up at their talks and try to prevent them from communicating with others."]

Re: Heresy

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reversing much of the last half-century's progress on women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and disability rights, and _not_ see a politics of heresy emerging from the right. Gee, how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections as not trying to turn back LGBT rights? One wonders. Attempting to argue that the battles being fou…

> Gee, how would anyone look at a Republican administration whose first Supreme Court appointee penned a seminal decision on LGBT employment protections as not trying to turn back LGBT rights? One wonders. Sure, Obergefell and Bostock were good, but op was talking about the country, not just SCOTUS. You can't ignore things like bathroom/locker room bills, the Don't Say Gay bill, book banning, etc. You're narrowing to…

The right focuses on the second trimester issue because Roe mandates the availability of elective second trimester abortions, which people oppose. And the left demonizes Republican abortion laws like the one in Mississippi which contains exceptions for health of the mother and the baby. Your polls only confirm that where public opinion lies is something close to the Mississippi law (which incidentally isn’t dissimilar from the law in France or Germany).

As to your other point, you can’t use support for Democrats as a proxy for support for “social progressives.” My parents vote straight ticket democrat, but they’re not the least bit socially progressive. I’m not talking about democrats who support DACA. I’m talking about the ones who say “LatinX.” These are the ones driving the ideological rigidity PG is talking about. These folks are overwhelmingly white: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/ (“progressive activists” are 79% white, the same as “traditional conservatives”).

You have to appreciate that white people vote Democrat for different reasons than POC. Matt Yglesias has written about this at length. For example, Muslim Americans supported Bush in 2000. Post 9/11, Iraq and the anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right pushed many to Democrats. But Muslim Americans are still very conservative within their own communities: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres.... Additionally, many are alienated by the right not because it’s religious, but because it’s Christian specifically. Thus they may support democrats out of support for pluralism, not because they agree with Beto that we should strip tax exemptions from Catholic churches and mosques. Indeed, one of the starkest differences between white and non-white democrats is that white democrats overwhelmingly believe that religion isn’t necessary for morality, while about half of non-white democrats believe it is: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...

The right focuses on Warren’s primary run because it allows them to disentangle the “we like Obamacare Democrats” like my parents, from the socially progressive intersectional democrats like Warren. Indeed, even Sanders is a bad point of comparison because remember the Warren progressives attacked him as “racist and sexist.” Sanders is popular among Hispanics because social democracy is a broad lane among Hispanics.

And Warren shows just how unpopular “socialism plus intersectionality” is with POC. You cite the Iowa Caucus, but 91% of democrat Iowa caucus voters are white. The POC there are basically all college students. I don’t know why you didn’t cite the Super Tuesday results, which is when the diverse parts of the Democratic Party actually vote. Warren got crushed among POC. Among Black people in Virginia, for example, she got 7%, losing to Bloomberg: https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/super-tuesday-14-states.... Among Hispanics in Texas she got 8%. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-boosted-sanders-...

All told, Warren’s support in Super Tuesday was 80% white, in an electorate that was only 50% white. Warren was, in fact, never even a viable candidate in a diverse Democratic Party: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elizabeth-warren-boo.... We were subjected to her for a year because she’s incredibly popular among the highly educated white people who run the media and everything else. It hasn’t been lost on me, as a person of color, how many of the loudest voices talking about race over the last year in elite circles were both white and Warren supporters.

There’s other data points too, such as Eric Adams winning Blacks and Latinos in the NYC primaries, and Yang winning Asians, while white progressives decried both.

Re: Heresy

#705

I 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…

In 1985 you could say “homosexuality is a disease and all gay should be locked up” and you wouldn’t have to be too worried about your employment. Today you can say “I’m gay” and don’t have to worry about being fired for it. I like today’s freedom of expression better.

Re: Heresy

#706

In the 90s and 2000s it would be “heresy” to be a gay or transgendered person. I remember sadly how people in hushed tones would talk about coworkers. There was a bro-y norm to engineering culture that you didn’t defy very easily. I'm a bit surprised how easily people forget these things.

No post body was provided.

Re: Heresy

#707

> For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion If that's how Graham reads such statements, isn't he basically saying "It's heresy to call a statement x-ist" in his presence? What am I missing, this seems totally hypocritical given the rest of his argument?

Does Graham say people who make those statements should be ostracized and fired? I don't see the parallel at all.

No, he’s not saying that.

I interpreted it as saying, for him, as soon as he hears one of those words, the conversation is over.

Which… sounds like… if not heresy, then taboo?

Re: Heresy

#708
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just gave three examples off the top of your head but you need to make sure he picked the right one..?

I believe the author was pointing out that pg is selective in his application of "heresy."

So you agree that the issue of heresy is a problem, but instead of addressing the actual issue, you are more interested in knowing which team PG is in, in the ongoing pattern of treating politics like team sports.

Re: Heresy

#709
post #640

> 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…

Another fraught heresy, which I'm about to commit, is that men and women are intrinsically different (in aggregate, on average, blah blah blah) and thus if you swap the genders in your story, it is a genuinely different story. Granted, I can't say that I have positive regard for older women who sleep with teenagers, though I'm glad you didn't garner any trauma from it, but my personal experiences lead me to have a very negative opinion of older men who sleep with teenagers. Maybe it'd be different if that weren't a highly stigmatized thing to do, but currently the selection effects are such that 99% of them are scumbags. For the same reasons that counterculture groups have a higher-than-average incidence of rapists (anecdotally, I admit) — when you gather a bunch of people willing to transgress societal norms together, well, said transgression continues.

> The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, 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.

I just proved your point, didn't I? :P

Re: Heresy

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It’s interesting how “I support rights of private companies but only when they do something totalitarian” has become such a common position in the US.

I'm confused by what you are saying here. Corporations have always been totalitarian in their decision making. How often have you heard from your boss "this isn't a democracy" when they make a decision that's unpopular among the employees?

The more interesting dynamic to me is the free-market, anti-regulation, low-corporate-tax capitalist politicians arguing we should create regulations to make the market less free.

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