Once again… for the ten millionth time (congratulations!)…
conservatives demonstrate that they are incapable of understanding the
difference between innate, harmless qualities, and freely chosen,
harmful, antisocial beliefs.
One of many reasons that I feel conservatism is an ideology that is
all about obsessing over signs and signals, while never understanding
the meaning they convey. They understand that making racist
comments will get you cancelled, but they don’t understand why.
Which leads to a cargo cult scenario where they see racists get
pilloried, and they think that if they can mimic that same kind of
outrage but apply it to their enemies on “the left” (i.e. literally
everyone who isn’t extremely conservative), it will magically create a
scandal of the same intensity. Again, because they don’t understand the
building blocks of the original scandal, only the outward signals and
signs.
Republicans have been able to "cancel" people with extreme effectiveness for a long time. Look up Shirley Shirrod, ACORN, or the Dixie Chicks. It's very recent that sanctimonious right wing chest beating isn't enough to yeet someone from public life.
There was an amazing thread on HN that was working through the game theory of "cancelling" someone. They came to a conclusion that in order to "win" at social media, you want to "cancel" people as early and often as you can.
The author's understanding of cancelling was wild, it was like invoking a magic spell in their mind - you declare someone "cancelled" and they are. You then gain clout _from_ cancelling someone, so logically you must cancel people before they can cancel you
Some people tried poking holes in their(it's his who am I kidding) logic, but the author was adamant that conservatives had to start cancelling people lest they be cancelled themselves
> The author's understanding of cancelling was wild, it was like invoking a magic spell in their mind - you declare someone "cancelled" and they are. You then gain clout from cancelling someone, so logically you must cancel people before they can cancel you
This reminds of this art project someone who's obsessed with "cancel culture" put together. I give you [The Cancel God (video)](https://twitter.com/peternlimberg/status/1289241648912728065):
> The Cancel God has been summoned.
>
> "The Cancel God wants to cancel you. It wants to cancel everyone you know. It wants to cancel humanity itself."
>If we are afraid to speak what we believe to be true, we cannot engage in real dialogue. If we cannot engage in real dialogue, we cannot collectively figure out how to respond to the existential risks that threaten our existence. If we cannot figure out how to respond to these risks, then our existence will be collectively threatened, and we risk going extinct.
We can't do anything about climate change if we're not allowed to say the n-word, sorry, no way around it
This is the dark forest theory applied to social media. https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-forest-theory-a-terrifying-explanation-of-why-we-havent-heard-from-aliens-yet
The Fermi ‘Paradox” is always gonna be a big issue for me, because I hate how it games the equation to come up with something eye-catching. Quite aside from the fact that it’s heavily reliant on plugging in the right numbers to get a surprising result (which is a flaw in itself), the bloody thing turned up only around the same time that steady-state cosmology was roundly rejected in favour of a Big Bang. It’s a parlour game: you can tell the difference between somebody who knows their history of science by checking whether they’re really invested in the Fermi Paradox as a genuine object of investigation or whether they think it’s fun to think about.
I think it's a fascinating way to go around the criticism of UFO conspiracy theories that modern tech should have produced much better evidence by now. You take all of the fundamental assumptions of those theories and just leave out the UFOs. They were dead the whole time!!!
I don't know who said it, but a point was once made that reactionaries are like dogs in that they don't understand convictions behind actions, or have real beliefs, they just don't like when they see or hear certain patterns or shapes.
Like a dog might get upset by some shadowy figure making loud noises, the reactionary gets upset when "one of those people" makes some noise. For example, with BLM, they don't like it when black people or those on the left protest, but when it comes to Stop the Steal or protesting lockdowns, protesting is good, actually. To them, BLM protests and protesting the NFL because someone knelt during the anthem are the same thing.
> To them, BLM protests and protesting the NFL because someone knelt during the anthem are the same thing.
I nearly pulled my hair out recently trying to explain to a Redditor that the capitol insurrection was different from the George Floyd protests -- the latter being a righteous and necessary protest reacting to real, unjust events; the former being bullshit based on lies and nonsense (that got several people killed).
Like... the idea that we *don't* live in a vacuum, and things can actually be good or bad, was completely foreign to this person. They were unable to process it. It's like the Reddit centrist neutral obsession on steroids. Except that Reddit is mostly American so the "centre" is really just super right-wing.
Like with all things, you eventually get to a point where all you can do is quote Dril:
>the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
I remember reading a Zizek piece in the LRB - although the point had long been made before, but he has a certain eloquence - that simply comparing numbers killed by the Nazis vs the Soviets is a silly metric for understanding the two political ideologies
Granted, I have no love lost for the Soviet Union or Stalinism or whatever, but he makes the point very effectively that - as you say - it’s a hair-tearing exercise to try to convince some people that in politics there are other things than sheer numbers in play
I think it was this one:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms
Plus once you get into the numbers game, you have to get into the why the victims of capitalism never get counted or considered in any way, which is another interminable argument.
Thanks for the link. I can never have too many Zizek pieces to get through.
It is because Nazism and Communism are discrete phenomena that make the practice of counting victims relatively simple. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union actively murdered people and kept records of it. Capitalism does not have clearly defined edges, as it were, nor can the victim category be easily defined. It the person who perishes from a lack of food a victim of capitalism or a victim of famine? You could say both, but to be coherent you'd have to establish why the famine was caused by capitalism or was different from those famines prior to the 1600s.
>Capitalism does not have clearly defined edges, as it were, nor can the victim category be easily defined.
This sounds a whole lot like "the Soviet Union is communist because they said they are communist, but the United States doesn't count as capitalist because it's not a perfect match for the ideology's platonic ideal form"
The whole game here (not accusing you specifically, I've just seen this pattern) is to count people who died in war+famines+state policy in the Soviet Union as "victims of communism", but not to count people who died of these things in capitalist counties as "victims of capitalism", because *cApItAlIsM iS jUsT fReE tRaDE*
It sounds nothing like that. I can't see the pathway from what I wrote to what you've taken away.
This is almost insulting. How the hell can you extract the meaning, "*the Soviet Union is communist because they said they are communist, but the United States doesn't count as capitalist because it's not a perfect match for the ideology's platonic ideal form*" from "*Capitalism does not have clearly defined edges, as it were, nor can the victim category be easily defined.*" The USA isn't mentioned, nor referred to even obliquely.
I don't think your assessment here is quit fair.
Capitalism doesn't have clearly defined edges, yes. There are very few countries that we can say are 'purely' capitalist.
But neither does communism, if we apply that same standard. The Soviet Union was not a purely communist state. The point the guy who first replied to you was trying to make (a bit rudely, I'll admit), is that people take into account all this "fuzziness" when trying to judge capitalism, but not when trying to judge communism.
People often lump everybody who died violently in The Soviet Union, whether from famine or war or actual direct state action, into the category of "victims of communism" (that's where some of the bigger estimates of communist victims come from), but do not do the same thing for people who die violently in/due to the actions of capitalist countries.
The point is that communism is only treated as "well-defined" because people use The Soviet Union as a stand-in for the entire ideology. But if they can do that, then the US can and should be used as a stand-in for all of capitalism, eliminating the problem of "no clearly defined edges" from the conversation entirely.
Now of course this whole thing changes if people wanted to discuss the victims of The Soviet Union, as opposed to the victims of communism. But the entire point of this discussion is how those two things are treated (arguably unfairly) as one in the same, in a way that is not applied to other ideologies and their "archetypal" nation states.
There is a truism that any attempt to count victims in a greater sense is going to end up saying mroe about the counter than what is counted.
Like, say you wanted to make a tally of the people Hitler killed. Who do you include? The people intentionally killed in genocide, certainly. The people starved to provide german armies? Probably. Enemy combatants and civlians killed by starting a world war? Do we count german civilians killed by the allies in the war Hitler started? Do we count people killed by Hitlers allies fighting in the war that he started? Do we count when those allies then get killed by the allies? Do we count those who died because of wartime policies in other countries that might have been better served had resources been directed to say, healthcare rather than making guns to shoot nazis?
Similar thing with Stalin or Mao. Do we count the people who died because Stalin trusted Hitler for too long as killed by Stalin? By Hitler? Both? When does negligence become active participation? Etc. etc.
Capitalism doesn't have clearly defined edges, in the sense of cause and effect rather than ideology. The man who dies from hunger in Missouri in 1896 is not a clear victim of capitalism the way that a Ukrainian in 1932 is of communism.
The issue of edges in capitalism comes not from whether a country is capitalist or not, but rather of responsibility. Communism and Nazism don't have this fuzziness anywhere near the same levels because the expressions of them have been totalitarian.
The Soviets and the Nazis took action to kill and cause death, whereas the majority of those deaths I see ascribed to capitalism would occur in pre-capitalist societies just the same.
>The point is that communism is only treated as "well-defined" because people use The Soviet Union as a stand-in for the entire ideology. But if they can do that, then the US can and should be used as a stand-in for all of capitalism, eliminating the problem of "no clearly defined edges" from the conversation entirely.
Very much not talking about ideology. It's about edges of responsibility.
The totalitarian nature of the communist and Nazi nation-states compared to the liberalism of the United States changes the equation because of the nature of the responsible actor.
I see where you're coming from, though I don't quite agree. Capitalism is unique in this sense because the artificial scarcity that leads to people starving to death even in countries with plenty is often an explicit creation of capitalism, and this cannot be waved by just saying that the same thing could have occurred in a pre-capitalist society. This obfuscation of responsibility is not a bug, but a feature of capitalism - its faith in the free market. Absolving the ideology of any wrong-doing when the free market fails feels wrong to me.
But I will agree that ascribing deaths to capitalism in that way is going to be more difficult/fuzzy. Its perfectly possible - and I'd argue perfectly valid - but still not an easy task. There are much easier, more concrete ways - like the deaths that occurred during the early stages of colonialism (its crazy how much of the world was initially colonized by companies looking to make a profit, like India or many American States) or modern day imperialism (like the Banana Wars).
Hoarding of resources is something so broadly present in societies that I would hesitate to even call it a feature of capitalism, rather than an extant factor that capitalism was simply put on top of, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (As an aside, much of what is seen as artificial scarcity is not artificial scarcity of the resource itself, but scarcity of information about the demands of that resource and transportation capacity for that resource because identifying and allocating resources is a bitch of a process not matter what mechanism you're using)
Absolving the ideology of wrong-doing and failures of the free market aren't as related as you put them, I think. Wrong-doing and failure aren't the same. The same as I wouldn't put wrong-doing and failure by a doctor on the same. There's certainly wrong-doing by actors in the market and there's very real and currently active potential and operational vicious cycles which are more towards inherent faults, but the market mechanism not being perfect and falling short is not.
Again I run into a, at least in my own functions of comprehension, another issue of edges, in that, is colonialism a sub-subset of capitalism or is it it's own thing responsible for it's own flaws? Romans and Greeks were colonists, but not capitalist, and many, many reasons for imperialism and colonialism were markedly not profit or capital oriented, but the EIC was a very profit engineered machine but Clive of India went against orders in Bengal to the consternation of the Board, and Richard Wellesley was a force-unto-himself but was very much following the rhetoric of Pitt and the political struggle against France, rather than the dictates of profit. I can't reconcile the war with Mysore to capitalism any more than Waterloo. Then there the bloody colonialism of the Appalachian region by the Scot covenanters which was not a profit motivation either, but a religious/political/whatever the term is for a people who violently claim a land to establish a home for themselves far from the dictates of England or republican aristocracy of America.
This is just a subset of why I find it so much harder to give over responsibility to the ideology of capitalism, as compared to when the NKVD just massacres or ethnically cleanses or interns or when the food is stolen by a central power, a central authority, an order makes guilt and responsibility tangible.
Shits difficult.
> The man who dies from hunger in Missouri in 1896 is not a clear victim of capitalism the way that a Ukrainian in 1932 is of communism.
A person in 1932 Ukraine starves because some agent of the state is pointing a gun at them, telling them not to eat the bread.
A person in 1896 Missouri starves because the police (who enforce property law) point guns at people who try to steal food.
I'm not seeing much of a difference here? Why is the latter "more difficult" to assign responsibility?
The Holodomor was an active policy of the Stalinist government whereas the Missourian isn't suffering because of any action by the US government or capitalist ideology.
Property ownership and punishment of thieves, even starving ones, isn't the fault of capitalism. Both of those were the state of affairs prior to capitalism, as the concept of "this is mine" and "don't steal" are human and have been around as long a humans have.
Are you really saying that police pointing guns isn't an "action by the government"?
And that enforcement of private property has no relationship with capitalist ideology?
If someone dies in 1896 Missouri because the state has determined they should not have access to food, this is *literally state extermination policy*.
Here, let me flip the script and see if you still agree:
"The Holodomor is not the fault of socialism, because state property ownership, and the punishment of people who violate state property ownership, was the state of affairs before the invention of socialism. The concept of "this is mine" and "don't steal" are human and have been around as long a humans have."
Police in the USA are agents of local and state governments, not the federal US government. Nor are police necessarily officers of a government, as throughout history much of law enforcement has been a function of community militia.
>And that enforcement of private property has no relationship with capitalist ideology?
This is not what I said. I want you to find the sentence in my comment in which I wrote those words.
What you'll find is that I said property ownership isn't the fault of capitalism, a statement that can be proven by the fact that people owned stuff prior to capitalism.
>If someone dies in 1896 Missouri because the state has determined they should not have access to food, this is *literally state extermination policy*.
At what point did the state determine they should not have food? The state did not take food from them, it did not institute a policy of stealing food from Missouri, it did not prevent people from leaving to find food.
>Here, let me flip the script and see if you still agree: "The Holodomor is not the fault of socialism, because state property ownership, and the punishment of people who violate state property ownership, was the state of affairs before the invention of socialism. The concept of "this is mine" and "don't steal" are human and have been around as long a humans have."
I'm afraid you've made substantial factual errors in your statement here.
State property ownership was not the norm, and especially not the state of affairs.
It is especially farcical that you would use that final line given that the food wasn't Stalin's and that the food was stolen.
Furthermore, the Holodomor was deliberately caused as a goal of government policy by a socialist government for the cause of socialism.
> Furthermore, the Holodomor was deliberately caused as a goal of government policy by a socialist government for the cause of socialism.
A few years ago I was debating this topic on the SSC open threads, and at some point in the debate the other guy floated a 100% sincere argument, that the reason why the USSR counts for socialism is that the USSR had socialism in its name and flag, while the US doesn't describe itself as "capitalist" in its constitution/name/flag, and therefore doesn't count for capitalism.
It's stuck with me for its sheer ridiculousness.
Okay, but that's irrelevant to this conversation.
Not all the deaths caused by the USSR count nor do all the deaths by the USA count for their respective political/economic systems.
>It is especially farcical that you would use that final line given that the food wasn't Stalin's and that the food was stolen.
???
Under socialism, all property belongs to the state. It wasn't "Stalin's" but it was definitely the property of the USSR. If someone who was dying during the Holodomor tried to take a loaf of bread that belonged to the state (i.e., all loaves of bread), against the will of the state, that would absolutely be theft.
>At what point did the state determine they should not have food?
The moment Missouri decided to enforce private property law. (I'm not impressed by your attempt at a state vs. federal distinction here. It doesn't matter to me if you want to frame it as "the USA is capitalist" or "the 50 states that comprise the USA are collectively capitalist", it's all very pedantic IMO)
>Furthermore, the Holodomor was deliberately caused as a goal of government policy by a socialist government for the cause of socialism.
And enforcement of private property law in the US is deliberately carried out in the name of capitalism.
>What you'll find is that I said property ownership isn't the fault of capitalism, a statement that can be proven by the fact that people owned stuff prior to capitalism.
Capitalism is defined by private ownership. People who starve due to private ownership are absolute starving due to capitalism. You cannot wriggle out of it by saying that they could have theoretically starved under some alternative economic arrangement, so capitalism isn't at fault. (I mean, you *can* say that, but the "two can play that game" implications are so obvious that I hope you won't)
> ??? Under socialism, all property belongs to the state. It wasn't "Stalin's" but it was definitely the property of the USSR. If someone who was dying during the Holodomor tried to take a loaf of bread that belonged to the state (i.e., all loaves of bread), against the will of the state, that would absolutely be theft.
The state stole that property from the people. It's not theft to take back a stolen item from a thief.
>The moment Missouri decided to enforce private property law.
Any government or authority that outlaws theft is guilty of murder?
>(I'm not impressed by your attempt at a state vs. federal distinction here. It doesn't matter to me if you want to frame it as "the USA is capitalist" or "the 50 states that comprise the USA are collectively capitalist", it's all very pedantic IMO)
The fact I had to make the distinction is because you fucked up your reading a few comments ago.
>And enforcement of private property law in the US is deliberately carried out in the name of capitalism.
No, it's carried out in the name of "people don't want their stuff stolen so they vote for that and organise militias to enforce that". The punishment and prevention of theft isn't a capitalist invention, it existed prior to capitalism.
>Capitalism is defined by private ownership. People who starve due to private ownership are absolute starving due to capitalism. You cannot wriggle out of it by saying that they could have theoretically starved under some alternative economic arrangement, so capitalism isn't at fault. (I mean, you *can* say that, but the "two can play that game" implications are so obvious that I hope you won't)
Private ownership is a necessary but not sufficient quality for capitalism. Just because people won't hand out their stuff for nothing or consent to it being taken doesn't mean that capitalism is causing people to starve.
I can refute your claim by demonstrating that they could and did starve under alternative economic arrangements because it disproves the assertion that capitalism was at fault. The "two can play at that game" implications only exist because you, incorrectly, think they do.
> The state stole that property from the people.
This is not possible: It is the state that determines who-owns-what. Unless you are just using "property" as a stand in for "my preferred economic distribution (whether it actually exists or not)", which again, is game two can play.
>Any government or authority that outlaws theft is guilty of murder?
All enforcement of property requires the threat of initiation of violence against the non-compliant. I'm just acknowledging that for what it is. If you want to call it "murder", that's a judgement call you can make, but "x results in Y" is just a descriptive fact if reality.
>Private ownership is a necessary but not sufficient quality for capitalism.
I don't know if we're even debating about the same thing. Read the first sentence on Wikipedia's "Capitalism" and get back to me.
>Just because people won't hand out their stuff for nothing or consent to it being taken doesn't mean that capitalism is causing people to starve.
Of course it does! I feel like I'm going crazy here. If [action x results in outcome y], then "x causes y" is the normal way of phrasing it.
> It the person who perishes from a lack of food a victim of capitalism or a victim of famine? You could say both, but to be coherent you'd have to establish why the famine was caused by capitalism or was different from those famines prior to the 1600s.
I ain't Irish, but if the famine in Ukraine during the 30s can be traced back to the Soviet Union (and it can) then what Britain did to Ireland during their own famine can be traced back to them. And percentage-wise, which was worse? It's not *that* difficult.
It is difficult because the Holodomor and the Irish famine aren't the whole extent of either ideology.
> And percentage-wise, which was worse?
On one train track there's three people and there's only one on the other, but it's clear that it's worse to kill the single person because his family is smaller.
The reaction is downright pavlovian, made even when the comparison makes absolutely no sense. It feels like an attempt to brute-force the conversation through constant repetition.
Empathy being one of the key factors that helps us to understand the deeper meaning and motivations behind people's outward expressions. So when you take that out of the picture, everything gets flattened into a grand battle of noise, wherever the winner is whoever is loudest.
I’m not sure I understand the take you’re having in your comment. Not having empathy enables acts of sadism and callousness. The role of such psychology in framing rightwing ideology is well studied, and rather obvious.
I'm just saying that it's another reason that conservatives have difficulty interpreting the deeper meaning behind people's words and actions, as empathy is a critical tool in allowing us to understand these things.
> One of many reasons that I feel conservatism is an ideology that is all about obsessing over signs and signals, while never understanding the meaning they convey.
*something witty about Baudrillard goes here*.
Nozick was politically a sort of left-wing/social-democrat type in the 60s until he met Murray Rothbard, the bizarre libertarian weirdo/Austrian (read: outsider) economist who towers over most of the modern history of libertarianism in America. He developed Rothbard’s ideas into a book of ethical/political philosophy called *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (1974) which remains influential in academic circles but is generally disregarded amongst politically active libertarians, who are usually more fond of Ayn Rand and Rothbard himself - in spite of the fact that Rand and Rothbard had a major falling out, if I remember correctly, although it could be that I’m thinking of Ludwig von Mises, of whom Rothbard was a major acolyte and who definitely fell out with Rand. In libertarian/anarcho-capitalist circles, almost immediately the book was seen as giving far too much ground to the social-democrats/socialists/communists etc. (this is in the 70s) and Nozick, despite his rather extreme libertarian views, was mostly ignored except in academia.
Postscript: Nozick was a smart guy, a very clever guy, and made a number of great contributions to philosophy, but even setting aside my own political leanings (which are in stark contrast to his) I’m not personally a fan. A good friend of mine who is a university professor on ethics uses some of Nozick’s arguments for veganism, so I guess it can’t be all bad. Also, in the 90s or thereabouts Nozick softened some of his more hardline views, and expressed a certain amount of regret about being too clever back in the 70s: by the way if you enjoy a good bit of academic rhetoric, Brian Barry’s excoriating review of *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* is a must-read (he doesn’t so much review the content of the book as shout at it for being juvenile, and says as much in I believe the first paragraph, something like “I’m not even going to address this book on its own terms”)
Edit: “gosh Pop, how do you know so much about everything?!”, because I am *always exhausted and terrified of the world*
I actually read Anarchy, State & Utopia for philosophy class at some point.
IIRC; one of thet things that should be noted it that it was written specifically against Rawls a theory of justice, though Rawls and Nozick were friends and he starts by basically saying "Eveyrone should read it because its darn clever, now heres why I disagree..."
Yeah, that’s true, but I wanted to emphasise the Rothbard angle because it’s not as well known. In my “actually giving a shit” phase about political philosophy, I did take Nozick and ASU seriously enough to give it a read, but ultimately I landed on more economic stuff and political realism as being more important and interesting than Nozick’s penchant for thought experiments, which is why I think it’s important to trace the less official history (i.e. Nozick’s more casual acquaintances like Rothbard). Tbh I’m not a particularly big fan of Rawls either, in spite of his obvious brilliance, especially since I find his account of civil disobedience something of a dissatisfying fudge.
Nozick, to his credit, was a bullet-biter, even when his conclusions were abhorrent, and it’s a common criticism of Rawls that he always wanted to moderate things and smooth everything over for the post-war liberal project.
There is definitely a thing about both Rawls and Nozick doing thought experiments to justify their positions rather than thinking about the actual positions if that makes sense. (though Rawls does at least kind of own up to it, IIRC? basically in trying to construct a justification for the things he alreayd believes)
Yeah, and I won’t fault Rawls for doing that: plenty of other great works revolve around the author thinking they’ve got it right and just need to come up with a clever tool for justifying it, either conceptually or even just rhetorically. It’s in the nature of our game. Where I think Rawls goes wrong is in assuming that e.g. from behind his famous Veil of Ignorance there is a model citizen who more or less resembles a stereotypical kind-hearted mid-westerner who just wants to get on with life as comfortably as possible.
His account of civil disobedience that I mentioned sort of rides that line. He wants to have the legal cake against civil disobedience and eat the moral justification for civil disobedience at the same time. This is why I prefer to place such authors/philosophers in their social context: historical analysis of why and where from certain mores emerge is actually pretty important.
Nozick is a different sort of animal though. He’s more of a showman, who wants to wow you with something flashy and erudite and radical - and this extends to his non-political work in epistemology too - more than he wants to get down in the weeds to say why he thinks what he thinks. To be perfectly honest I’ve never been really sure if Nozick actually believed a lot of what he said, whereas I’m certain that Rawls really did think at least the most important meat of his arguments.
Yeah, Nozick clearly feels like the guy who wants to vow you with his arguments rather than someone who is actually deeply believing, he feels very much like the kind of guy for whom winning the argument in a flashy way is more important than what the argument is, so he will bite the bullet with repugnant conclusions because the conclusions arent really the most important bit?
I think that is actually one of Nozicks arguments against Rawls that makes sense, IE: That he constructs the Veil of Ignorance in precisley such a way that you will get the result he wants. (IE: You are ignorant about certain things, but not others ina very specific way to get a very specific outcome, with no real justification as to whyother than "to get this specific outcome")
> Nozick, despite his rather extreme libertarian views, was mostly ignored except in academia.
Do you think this is a product of the content of his thought, or just an artifact of Objectivist influence in the culture industry, anti-intellectual bias among conservatives, or other things like this?
My understanding (such as it is) is that in attempting to ground his views in the sort of terms/method peculiar to analytic philosophy, Nozick alienated a lot of the anarcho-capitalism/libertarian world by the very act of trying to found his ideology in *a priori* reflections on the nature of thought/epistemology and investigating the grounds for libertarian or anarcho-capitalist political principles: by contrast the Rothbard/Mises way of doing things is to assert that there are are a set of *a priori* principles which are simply not up for debate because to any rational agent they should be undeniable in the first place.
This has similarities with Rand and the Objectivists, in spite of Rand’s falling out with the anarcho-capitalists/libertarians, where the radical and far-reaching conclusions of the two or three movements are held to stem from quite simple logic analysis. It’s a matter of asserting first principles and claiming that everything that follows is a sound deduction from them. So, at least in my opinion, Nozick was ostracised or ignored within his own libertarian circles mostly because he attempted to found the foundations - such as with the Wilt Chamberlain argument - which was methodically anathema to a culture which had staked its territory on the *unanalysability* of these fundamental truths: they want/ed a schema that expands from a handful of basic concepts, rather than one which submitted to careful reflection and admitted of counter-arguments etc.
So I wouldn’t say that it has much to do with anti-intellectual bias, so much as the historical contingency of a time when a small group of heterodox intellectuals found themselves in a position to make some money off relatively cheap rhetoric, and coming up against somebody who was interested in questioning that rhetoric at a deeper level, chose to take the money and run (at least they’re consistent there) rather than subject their ideology to philosophising and questioning about the nature of economic relata. Recall that in ASU Nozick is quite careful to separate the moral and economic issues, whereas his audience amongst the capitalists consistently elide the two from a vaguely Lockean standpoint of the inalienable right to property (recall also Locke’s fudge over slavery, and Rothbard’s own comments about the ownership of children). My final comment would be to point that even outside politics Nozick distinguished himself by taking an exploratory attitude to doing philosophy, which is in contrast to the (pseudo?) *a priori* deductive approach favoured by Rothbard and fellow travellers: remember The Alamo, sure, but also remember that amazing YouTube video from the libertarian convention where they booed Gary Johnson for taking a middle ground over drivers’ licences.
This is interesting. I suppose it's the kind of thing I had in mind as anti-intellectual, though you've put a finer point on it.
I confess I was mystified when I first encountered Objectivists, as they would sincerely just insist "You're literally denying A=A" in response to the most diverse and complex propositions: "A well-orchestrated system of taxation is a perfectly reasonable means of funding important public projects...", "You're literally denying A=A"... "Kant's transcendental idealism is an attempt to furnish post-Newtonian science with a philosophical framework...", "You're literally denying A=A." The axiom invoked not, as one would think, as the first step in a long process of reasoning showing the relevant elaboration, but rather just as if it required no elaboration. Indeed, when I pressed for an elaboration, I was told that not seeing that I was literally denying A=A is, you guessed it, literally denying A=A -- and hence there could be no need, not even a question, of any elaboration. And my ardent irrationality having thereby been established, there was no point disputing the matter further with me and I had been vanquished. It's like something out of a Monty Python skit.
I never thought of von Mises/Rothbard as this bad. Though my engagement with them was largely me reading praxeology on my own and trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of it, whereas my engagements with Rand are via oddballs in online forums unselfconsciously carrying out very bad long form comedy improv. Which might go some way to explaining my judgment of their relative merits.
I can see why someone who thinks of this kind of dogmatism as a virtue would take umbrage to Nozick's reasonableness. Though, naive that I am, I had thought not to expect libertarianism to be a movement to be defined by such a move -- I had thought that Nozick's reasonableness might, after all, be taken as a virtue.
You know, Sam Harris pretty consistently relies on that "This is just how things are, anyone who disagrees with me is to be excluded from discussion" shtick too -- sometimes in so many words! More colloquially, it seems to be the explicit reasoning offered for a lot of reactionary impulses -- present opposition to transgender rights, for instance.
I wonder if this is an epistemological corollary of some kind of conservative personality -- we favor security, thereby we favor the security of thinking our beliefs are deduced from axioms whose truth, and which deduction, are never open to question; thereby we take umbrage to someone like Nozick entertaining questions about such foundations (why, one must wonder whether he's covertly working for the opposition, with an attitude like that!).
(I don't like this kind of psychological explanation in these contexts, as -- again, naive that I am -- I am inclined to think of culture in terms of Bildung, and thus my orientation is always to be asking about what we have done as a culture to produce this result, and what we can do differently to improve ourselves.)
> if you enjoy a good bit of academic rhetoric, Brian Barry’s excoriating review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a must-read
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give it a read for sure. And thanks for the other info too, really interesting. I guess Bruenig qualified his choice of quotes with "Serious libertarians" which gives him some clearance but it probably does still hurt the persuasiveness of his piece in those circles (Which, to be fair, was never going to happen anyways. I don't think libertarians will even click links from Jacobin.)
> Edit: “gosh Pop, how do you know so much about everything?!”, because I am always exhausted and terrified of the world
😂 You read my mind because this is literally what I was thinking when I was reading your comment. Still, I'd say it beats my situation which is *always exhausted and terrified of the world but still knows nothing about anything*.
All I’ll say is that I’m lucky enough - in spite of lifelong mental health problems and career disappointments - to have a beneficent family that have given me the opportunity to spend all day almost every day poring over dusty texts in order to escape the horrors of the reality the books themselves describe
It’s a way of putting off reality by pretending it only exists in books
Most people never got that shot
I mean, sure, they are comparable. In the way that you can put them
right next to each other and compare how nothing alike they are.
Technically correct, I suppose?
How so? I would guess if you looked at an MRI with images showing a racist looking at the group of their choosing and a communist viewing a fat cat. The neural pathways of disgust and hate would be identically lit up. That is the point.
I would guess if you looked at an MRI with images showing a racist looking at the group of their choosing and a reality TV character viewing a large spider. The neural pathways of disgust and hate would be identically lit up. That is the point.
This is why arachnophobia is fascism, or something
The opening paragraph is pure enlightened centrism, perfect.
Wait that means we are done. The perfect enlightened centrist piece
was written. No need to ever write more about this subject. Congrats
enlightened centrist you have done it!
(Even more perfect, according to the comments, Bryan Caplan is
straight up wrong about what he thinks is happening).
E: lol, somebody is coming here and downvoting all the comments. The
Bryan must be defended!
E2: It does suck a bit, because underneath all the weird anti
communist bravado, there is a legit complaint that bad faith actors can
abuse a system. But this is just throwing the baby out.
I consider calling every mega murder/death event a holocaust be in pretty bad taste.
We don't call the siege and starvation of leningrad a holocaust for example.
Yeah fair enough. I suppose I wouldn't be that offended by the comparison since it was so deliberate and targeted but yeah not technically a holocaust probably
Holocausts of communism aside, he kind of seemed to be doing the Scott thing with regards to anarchism. Introducing it like "oh there are all kinds of anarchisms, it's kinda hard to define it" and then dumping a book sized pile of hate about how Spanish Anarchists were LITERALLY THE WORST seems like a very long winded, weasely and somewhat deniable way to plug ancapism as obviously correct.
This is why conservatives always end up siding with fascists and
other right wing authoritarians; they fear socialists more than they
fear war or genocide.
["Wherever I've been in the world, the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the communists. I laid many wreaths upon the graves of communists. That is not criminal."](https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/paul-robeson-testifies-before-huac/)
Caplan's ahistoricism is fucking infuriating.
This is a minor point, but why is communist capitalized? Improper capitalization is frequently associated with being a crank. Which he is, but... I don't even know, but I have an innate appreciation for people with doctorates, no matter how stupid they are, and this hurts my feelings.
Wow, did you even read the article?
> If George Mason University adopted an official Anti-Communist policy, I would oppose it.
> Why? All of the following reasons.
> 1...
> 2. The total number of bona fide Communists at GMU is tiny...
> 3. Given the near-absence of bona fide Communists...
It seems impossible to misinterpret "the near-absence of bona fide Communists in GMU" to mean "the near-absence of bona fide Communists in *the world*"
Again, his conclusions in the article may be ridiculous, but they would seem so even without strawmanning his position.
EDIT: Corrected numbering.
Once again… for the ten millionth time (congratulations!)… conservatives demonstrate that they are incapable of understanding the difference between innate, harmless qualities, and freely chosen, harmful, antisocial beliefs.
One of many reasons that I feel conservatism is an ideology that is all about obsessing over signs and signals, while never understanding the meaning they convey. They understand that making racist comments will get you cancelled, but they don’t understand why. Which leads to a cargo cult scenario where they see racists get pilloried, and they think that if they can mimic that same kind of outrage but apply it to their enemies on “the left” (i.e. literally everyone who isn’t extremely conservative), it will magically create a scandal of the same intensity. Again, because they don’t understand the building blocks of the original scandal, only the outward signals and signs.
The real reason he refuses to talk to communists is that the last time he debated a socialist he was BTFO:
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/03/libertarian-property-ownership-capitalism
I mean, sure, they are comparable. In the way that you can put them right next to each other and compare how nothing alike they are. Technically correct, I suppose?
The opening paragraph is pure enlightened centrism, perfect.
Wait that means we are done. The perfect enlightened centrist piece was written. No need to ever write more about this subject. Congrats enlightened centrist you have done it!
(Even more perfect, according to the comments, Bryan Caplan is straight up wrong about what he thinks is happening).
E: lol, somebody is coming here and downvoting all the comments. The Bryan must be defended!
E2: It does suck a bit, because underneath all the weird anti communist bravado, there is a legit complaint that bad faith actors can abuse a system. But this is just throwing the baby out.
Always fun to check out the 2005 version of Caplan’s website, before he put more effort into passing as a normie.
Ah yes Bryan Caplan I’m surprised he didn’t equate socialists with nazis wanting to exterminate jews
This is why conservatives always end up siding with fascists and other right wing authoritarians; they fear socialists more than they fear war or genocide.
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Lol