Comment on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:04:47 GMT

My own summary of some points that are often made would be:

If you build a society based on consent, don't be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium's 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.

Moral Progress hasn't happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.

The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.

Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.

McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR's main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?

Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.

The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.

The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.

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