[Link] More Right launched

mstevens

Various people (including Konkvistador who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog More Right

"A group blog, More Right is a place to discuss the many things that are touched by politics that we prefer wouldn’t be, as well as right wing ideas in general. It grew out of the correspondences among like minded people in late 2012, who first began their journey studying the findings of modern cognitive science on the failings of human reasoning and ended it reading serious 19th century gentlemen denouncing democracy. Surveying modernity, we found cracks in its façade. Findings and seemingly correct ideas, carefully bolted down and hidden, met with disapproving stares and inarticulate denunciation when unearthed. This only whetted our appetites. Proceeding from the surface to the foundations, we found them lacking. This is reflected in the spirit of the site."

Various people (including Konkvistador who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog More Right

Sorry, Gwern is right. I would comment there, and I know that you have indeed been looking forward to my input in particular, and might even fast-track my letters due to having confidence that I make for an interesting opponent... but even with all that, the entry barrier is too damn high!

You're basically inviting me to write short but reasonably complete essays in which I'd have to cover the inferential distance from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum... explain where exactly I agree or disagree with your criticisms of the dominant liberal worldview... figure out how much I should adjust for Least Convenient Possible World and whether it'd make sense for me to concede some claims outright... provide an introduction to some schools of thought which a right-wing audience might've never encountered outside of a strawmanned pop-culture form [1] (and which even the MoreRight authors likely misunderstand in some subtle but crucial ways, as has been my impression whenever I tried to talk feminism with you)... explain why I think such traditions might have an advantage over an epistemic-learned-helplessness defense of conservative liberalism... provide such a defense where I feel I'm not learned enough or don't have a leg to stand on but still find the right-wing argument awful...

Shit, I've got a .txt file open right now with a Frankenstein's monster of a long comment intended to attack the neo-reactionary ideology with regards to issues of structural power and social dominance... epistemology and the biases/rationalizations caused by privilege (building on a "cheap shot" about your pals all being straight white tech-minded guys, having at least modest economic security, living in modern liberal democracies and communicating freely in a de facto libertarian-socialist network)... the way historical narratives are formed and how they relate to social psychology/self-image/intergroup relations (re: all conservative talk of a Relatively-Golden-Age)...

You might see where I'm going with this - or, rather, where I'd like to go. Been trying to hammer it into something at least comment-worthy, but the ideological challenges I see here are all interconnected and would all benefit from an optimized presentation... so it grows endlessly, and whichever angle I start shoring up, it ties into other perspectives and considerations...

And I would imagine that people who don't care much about such overarching socio-politico-epistemic ways of thought, and just wish to rebutt your criticisms of Modernity from a normal liberal/socialist/libertarian perspective, would get scared off too. High expectations for quality and tone + large inferential distances + restrictions of the medium + a potentially uncharitable reader base = ???

Frankly, I'm going to be surprised if you get to publish any substantial non-right-wing critical commentary from anyone other than Yvain. And that's only because he's already publicly undertaking such a challenge on his blog. Oh, well, and maybe TGGP. Can't imagine anyone else in the LW-sphere who'd brave all that time and effort.

1] Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx. If you're feeling puzzled by the suggestion... well, I'm reasonably confident that your cached picture of Marx is an useless straw one. Here, for example, I cleared up just one particularly egregious bit. (A wealth of further reading.)

I am just asking people to use their email client rather than their browser to write comments. And in a regular open thread they can write comments in the way they are used to when they primarily seek interaction with other readers or off topic discussion.

You underestimate how much nonrightwing people would be scared off by an actual right wing comment section. We are not therefore discussing expectations of quality or moderation here but only the trivial inconvenience of emailing them in.

I suspect your and gwerns comments are getting a lot of upvotes beca... (read more)

1drethelin13y

I think these long rants are exactly what they want to avoid.

29Nornagest13y

Never mind Marx, that's pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand's ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand's deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it's worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn't include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically -- and not without some irony -- becomes Class Warfare: The Novel. She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx's take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand's got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven't read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he's more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.

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[Link] More Right launched

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[Link] More Right launched

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