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Konkvistador comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
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These are called Paleoconservatives.
-- Encounters, by Paul E. Gottfried
-- Suicide of a Superpower, by Pat Buchanan
The left has it's own equivalent, it is supposedly the weaker force, made up of those speaking truth to power in the name of the little man. Yet it has more or less generally won for the past 200 years and consistently won for the last 70 years on all social issues it has picked up. This is interestingly also true when it has very little support of the people or when the people are divided and it takes a generation or two for the education system and media to change things.
What do you call a weaker side that consistently wins? The stronger side.
This in itself is a quite potent source of power.
I'm a fan of this guy since I learned of him about a year ago. While I don't care for the show or the host, this audio interview is some classic enjoyable Gottried.
Actually now that I think of it, this might be a better or rather shorter one video.
I'm actually familiar with that interview series. It is a pretty decent overlook of altright/HBD/new right thinking on their relation to the mainstream conservatives and the left.
I liked the John Derbyshire and Henry Harpending ones especially.
Okay, so, here's an off-topic hypothetical.
In real life, I'm bisexual and am in an open relationship with a guy. Suppose that me and my boyfriend live in America and really, really want to get married, receive the same amount respect as a straight couple from the public institutions, and eventually adopt a child - those are some of the things that matter most to us in life. Suppose that we're also vaguely interested in Gottfried's brand of conservatism. (We aren't in the least.)
Wouldn't us publicly saying that he's a cool thinker not on some particular issue but "in general" be just the tiniest bit self-sabotaging?
(see http://takimag.com/article/the_creeping_pink_cloud)
(please note how I did make my will save vs. mind-killing this time; it might be just a dc10 roll, but still)
How many LessWrong readers oppose gay marriage or adopting children? In any case it is possible to respect a thinker while disagreeing with him, though obviously people usually only see "yay!" and "boo!" signs that spill over to everything a person does.
Oh, I mean saying that in daily life or at a political website.
Well that's a given.
People always, always see only "yay" and "boo" signs that spill over (in everyday, relatable contexts at least), unless we do the thing Traditional Rationality tells us to: exclude all names from discussion and don't look at the thingspace cluster. Which doesn't leave us well equipped to make a transition from political discussion to political action.
These kinds of ideas and intellectual traditions don't interest me because I want to engage in political action. ;)
But if you want a purely pragmatic appraisal in this sense:
If his values are sufficiently different from mainstream conservatism, he will attract dissatisfied conservatives but repulse some of the "moderates". If the current is in your favour, and on the pro-gay issues it certainly is I think, this can be strategically pretty successful. The Paleoconservatives themselves have a sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach to the far lefts criticism of Neoconservative foreign policy (nation building and spreading democracy via war ect..).
Oh. Might I ask if the chief reason is general curiosity, their supposed explanative power over the modern world (as you've mentioned before) or a desire to use them in non-political action of some sort? Because I don't see what the latter might consist of.
Can't parse this, sorry. Do you mean that he could amass enough push to affect the issues I want him affecting, but gay rights would remain out of his league so we'd be safe? Or that his most viable method of gathering followers (creating a broad split on his political flank) would force him to change his stance on gay marriage?
I meant that public opinion has generally been consistently moving towards acceptance of gay rights despite all the sheer numbers of religious people and not negligible funds regular conservatives have been unable to do anything about this. And it is happening pretty rapidly if you look at the numbers.
How could anyone like Paul Gottfried have a measurable effect on such a strong trend of all things?
I give up; what you're saying feels quite obvious to me, so it's now evident that this wasn't my true rejection. :) My true rejection is that I do indeed lump all the facts about people together and would feel sick and wrong supporting a bigote-
OH FUCK NO I DON'T WANT ANOTHER -20 TO KARMA HELP ME SHUT MY FACE (- wow, looks like someone's already willing to provide that -20 all by themselves. And now someone voted me back to where I was. Sigh, my revealed preferences seem to indicate that I'm just here to play a MMO, not to learn any "rationality" mumbo-jumbo.)
No problem DIRTY COMMIE SCU -- oh sorry.
But seriously dude its not a crime to just dislike certain people. As long as you know you real reasons even sometimes demanding rationalists can't object to that. :)
Don't get me wrong I do agree with some of their positions, even on some social issues (from your reactions it seems like you might too). It is just that I'm profoundly apolitical.
Don't mind you asking at all, I just hope I'm not mind-killing any readers by divulging such information! For me it is a mix of these two. They often have excellent explanatory power and even predictive power precisely because of the value dissonance with most of the rest of our intellectual elites, be they "left" or "right" politically. As well as just reading enjoyable well-written books and articles, but this might just be linked to my curiosity.
They are hard to use in non-political action since they have very little influence, so there isn't much opportunity for anything like career building or lobbying if that's what you meant to imply by this. :)
Maybe, maybe; relegating all the nice non-profit stuff to hyper-wealthy hyper-efficient private charities and freedom to discriminate (including discimination against discriminators you don't like) for all non-vital jobs sound kind of weirdtopian. I'm writing up a brief sketch of a weirdtopia I could stand, in fact, and maybe I'll include the latter in it.
On the other hand, I'm shocked by how many of the "alt-right" (both the respectable old white men like Gottfried and the Internet ones: Steve Sailer*, the folks I followed home from Moldbug's comments, etc) fail the gender/sexuality issues test; I can't imagine how hard one must squint one's brain to be so contrarian and still have their instrumental (or maybe sometimes even terminal, it's hard to tell) values so screwed up. I believe that in many cases it's not genuine homophobia/transphobia/whatever, they're simply exhibiting a knee-jerk rejection of the mainstream, with which I can kinda sympathize, but still, shit's fucked up.
*I can hardly resist using the "closeted/intimacy issues" card on Sailer; what the fuck, dude, I just get a bad vibe from both my reaction and his provocations.
Alicorn would probably produce a much better and more insightful rant on this topic than me, maybe I'll ask her.
Could you, by chance, link to Sailer expressing his opinions on the topic of homosexuality? I am having difficulty finding anything conclusive.
I saw you arguing with someone here about the possibility of being "apolitical". Suffice to say, I agreed with them and not you; already forgot how their line went, though, d'oh!
I didn't know anything I could be pointing at by saying that. Turns out that neither do you :)
It's probably impossible to be apolitical in the sense of being innocent of political influences, and it's definitely impossible to be apolitical in the sense of avoiding action with political implications. But it's probably not impossible to be apolitical in the sense of rejecting political identity (though it is a lot harder than that makes it sound), and even that helps eliminate a lot of important biases.
It's a fairly mainstream thought - for not-very-mainstream feminists.
And I concede to Konkvistador that the definition of "political" in the saying is not the mainstream definition that references only participation in political parties and the electioneering process.
Well apolitical as in not seeing my personal actions through a political lens first but rather primarily guided by my virtue ethics approach (regardless of political strategizing). Not ignoring political consequences, but not letting politics affect my identity.
And naturally in the conventional sense of abstaining from conscious political acts like voting, supporting candidates or talking about politics in everyday life. I also avoid consuming information about current political events, since it is just brain candy, delicious but rots your teeth.
Actually now that I think of it a few non-paeloconservatives have taken such a stance. John Derbyshire's (one of the writers at secular right) 2009 book was all about this:
I so need to read this book.
Thanks for posting that! The right really is more diverse philosophically and outlook wise than people often imagine.
Two people sitting in a canoe in a river, paddling in opposite directions. The person who is paddling in the direction the canoe moves on average isn't necessarily paddling faster.
True, but why consider him the underdog? Clearly the guy trying desperately to work against both the current and the crazy guy is the underdog. ;)
Perhaps some people feel that moving at the exact speed of the river's current,* instead of staying in place or going really slowly, is 1) best for everyone or 2) God's plan/the "natural and lawful" course of history.
*(which they can't measure, as in every known canoe people have been rowing with varying strength at various points in the river, and people can't stop rowing any more than they can stop breathing... damn, stretching a metaphor is an unpleasant feeling)
Its important to remember that Paleoconservatives and Paleolibertarians don't want to stand still, they just have a different course in mind.
Sure one might call that reactionary, but its hard to deny this is a very different vision of the future, of what is possible.
They obviously failed and they know it. But honestly I have much more respect for reactionaries than regular milquetoast conservatives who can't really rely on any kind of strong philosophical or coherent framework (beyond the generic argument against all change) since their very premises and value systems are basically an obsolete superseded version of the "liberalism" or "leftism" they sometimes rail against.
Beyond common negative statements, every one of them seems to have a very different vision of the future from the others. At least the practical differences between the theists and the non-theists would create an enormous gap if they all suddenly started to have some effect on big politics. Just look at all that happened to the Left since the last quarter of the 19th century.
This dude sounds more socially permissive than ME, lol (and I often find myself the most permissive one in a RL conversation). I'd say that the potential gap in the American right whom you collectively label as the underdog (we'd need to disassemble&examine all our definitions of power and influence before we could say that for sure) might be larger than with the Left, (as long as you don't count extremes as outlying as Pol Pot)
Oh I fully agree. They are a patchwork of different value systems that feel (and indeed are) crushed under the weight of general movements of society.
But don't underestimate on how much they could actually cooperate on when it came to actual policies. The left as fragmented and sectarian as it was and still is in some parts of Europe, has been very successful in influencing the intellectual and social norms not only laws in directions that when looking at history seems favourable to most involved in the wider political groups.
The actual result of economic inequality may seem as worse in the past by many, but had they not been active it would probably be much worse (as judged by their value systems).
Or look at the mainstream right. Christian fundamentalists, token libertarians and hawkish Neoconservatives... would any of these had it in itself given lots of power create a society compatible with any built by the other ones?
Neither a moderate liberal* nor a socialist/communist would likely welcome being lumped together with the other guy.
*(I'm using the European definition of liberalism, and I think that LW would do well to switch to using European political divisions in general)
I wasn't aware that there is a consistent European definition of liberalism.
I live in Slovakia. When people around me use the word "liberalism", and I ask them for definition, they all agree that it is something "about freedom". But when I ask what kind of freedom exactly... then some of them say it is a freedom to start your own business and do whatever you like as long as you don't harm anyone... and others say something that I interpret as the state should regulate everything, so everyone has a freedom to act without bad consequences. And both are convinced that their definition is the correct one, and sometimes they are surprised that someone could use the other definition.
Perhaps the first definition is the "classical liberalism" and the second one is the American usage (I guess in America word "socialist" was unpopular during the cold war, so socialists called themselves liberals), but the confusion is already here, too.
(This is part of the reason why politics is a mindkiller. People have strong opinions about things they don't even know what it means.)
Perhaps I shouldn't have talked about "definitions" at all then; maybe there's some word which can encapsulate that political labels are used mostly in contrast with other labeled concepts like them and are permeated with primal Green vs Blue, just like people belonging to a nation base their membership in it on the contrast with their non-membership in other nation-entities.
Yes.
When I think about how people around me, who don't identify with label "liberal", define the word "liberal", it usually means "not one of us". And when people who identify with label "liberal", define the word "liberal", it usually means "one of us".
So the outside definition really depends on what other political labels are frequent in given environment. For example in Slovakia many people identify as "conservative" which approximately means: Catholic, or someone who is not really Catholic, but accepts that Catholic church / culture / tradition is very important part of society. So their definition of "liberal" is simply someone who opposes the Catholic church and traditions; no more details are really necessary, because one label for all enemies is emotionally enough. Then there are many socialists who either use the word "liberal" for themselves to avoid some bad connotations of the word "socialist"; or they are proud to call themselves "socialists" or "communists", and then they use the label "liberal" for someone who supposedly opposes all equality, solidarity and generally any human feelings (some exaggerating here). Sometimes they even say "neo-liberal" which describes even stronger feelings of revulsion; it probably means: even worse than an ordinary liberal.
On the other hand, people who use label "liberal" for themselves, they simply mean: a cool person who has the same opinions as me. And then they are surprised to find out that other people using the same label have different opinions. But of course the explanation is that the other ones' use of the label is incorrect.
There is some nonzero correlation between political labels and their meanings, but it is far from a clear definition.
Could you elaborate on your reasons?
Just one reason I've cared to think of: intellectual discourse in literally the whole world outside of the U.S. uses European definitions. To us the Americans are the ones with weird counterintuitive definitions, and there's a lot more of us.
While this sounds plausible to me (and speaking as an American, I don't like American politics), I'd like to doublecheck: are you European, and if so how do you know that the world outside of Europe uses European definitions?
In Slovenia Liberalism is basically means a sort of light Libertarianism, or the closest we have to it.
I'm Russian (whether my nation can and should identify as European has been an unrelenting argument for the last 300 years), and I like reading syndication-based websites like russ.ru and liberty.ru, which quite commonly refer to non-Western thought or have articles by non-Western authors.
Really? In Portugal, 'liberals' are similar to what Americans call 'libertarians'.
Modern Classical Liberals are basically on the right in my country.