FAWS comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Yvain 07 April 2009 11:22PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (141)

Comments (141)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 08:45:31PM *  13 points [-]

"Everyone's liberal, things are hopeless, might as well stay home."

These are called Paleoconservatives.

The social class on which [Will Herberg] and I both once pinned our hope of national regeneration, those whom we jokingly referred to as "the Archie Bunkers," has gone the way of the dinosaur. It has been replaced by a multitude of vastly more radicalized versions of Meathead, Archie's fashionably liberal son-in-law who by now could be an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.

-- Encounters, by Paul E. Gottfried

Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.

-- Suicide of a Superpower, by Pat Buchanan

Liberals control all sorts of nefarious institutions that are currently exercising a stranglehold on power and hiding the truth, but most Americans, once you pull the wool off their eyes, are conservatives at heart and just as angry about this whole thing as they are. Any day now, they're going to throw off the yoke of liberal tyranny and take back their own country.

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.

There are branches of social science that consciously devote themselves solely to officially identifying the Powerful and the Powerless in every issue and conflict.

This in itself is a quite potent source of power.

Comment author: FAWS 24 January 2012 08:14:19PM 3 points [-]

What do you call a weaker side that consistently wins? The stronger side.

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2012 08:31:17PM *  6 points [-]

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. ;)

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 January 2012 08:49:22PM *  1 point [-]

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)

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2012 09:25:40PM *  4 points [-]

Its important to remember that Paleoconservatives and Paleolibertarians don't want to stand still, they just have a different course in mind.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state.

We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.

--Murray Rothbard

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.

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 January 2012 09:37:16PM *  0 points [-]

a very different vision of the future

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.

Murray Rothbard

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)

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2012 09:42:52PM *  1 point [-]

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?

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit