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Azathoth123 comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well I've been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the "mainstream" sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for "bad ethics", If you define "bad ethics" as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has "bad ethics". Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!"good ethics" has 2014!"bad ethics" and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!"good ethics" like will turn out to have 2034!"bad ethics" and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has "doubleplusungood ethics"].
Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
That there are many things that are considered good in 2014 but will no longer be considered good in 2034 is a standard progressive position.
Yes, but progressives always imagine that their views that will be vindicated in 2034. and their opponents' cast out. They never seem to consider the possibility that their current views will be regarded as wrong/outdated/evil, and those of their opponents (or possibly some as yet unknown view) triumphant. This pathology is not unique to progressives, but seems to be worse among them, because of their self-image as being "on the right side of history."
Except that, once again, I am not defining right and wrong by political faction. You are.
In that case how are you defining "right" and "wrong" are you using when you make the claim the neoreaction is based on "bad ethics"? If the answer is "whatever feels wrong to eli_sennesh", you might want to look into how you came to have those feelings.
I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I'm willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn't bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn't allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one's existing cultural "values" at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what's so bad about Cthulhu?) view of "progressivism" as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you've got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack "progressivism" (scare-quotes because today's conservatives get tarred as "progressives"), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she's practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent "real" ethics (for the record, I'm a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can't be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can't be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism's retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument -- but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn't really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society's motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn't only one, and this particular one isn't limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established -- and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing -- that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against -- but it's not as if they don't have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
Um, that's not what 2034!"bad ethics" means. That is in fact precisely the attitude that makes you 2014!"good". Obviously I don't know which of your attitudes will make your current self 2034!evil but some possibilities. (Note these are all from different event branches.)
1) Do you believe people's job should have a relation to their skills? That makes you a 2034(branch A)!evil abelist.
2) Do you believe your job should have any relation to your preferences? That makes you 2034(branch B)!selfish.
3) Do you believe people should be free to say "Allah doesn't exist"? That makes you a 2034(branch C)!evil Islamaphobe.
4) Do you believe parents have any responsibility towards the upbringing of their children? That makes you a 2034(branch D)!patriarchal oppressor.
I could invent more scenarios, but you get the idea.