Straw fascist ... has a point?

Oh.

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.

Might I ask if the chief reason is general curiosity, their supposed explanative power over the modern world

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.

or a desire to use them in non-political action of some sort?

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. :)

I am noticing that I am very, very confused. What is so controversial about ugh fields? Why is this a Banned Idea? I was somehow able to read the original article (didn't even notice it was deleted, I must have found a link to the original URL) and it seemed uncontroversial to me. Or is there a different 'Banned Idea' that I'm completely missing?

By that I mean, you are stressed because you are a faced with an intractable knot, so what you really need to do is optimize your knot-undoing procedure.

Or perhaps one should stop distracting oneself with stupid abstract knots altogether and instead revolt against the prefrontal cortical overmind, as I have previously accidentally-argued while on the boundary between dreams and wakefulness:

The prefrontal cortex is exploiting executive oversight to rent-seek in the neural Darwinian economy, which results in egodystonic wireheading behaviors and self-defeating use of genetic, memetic, and behavioral selection pressure (a scarce resource), especially at higher levels of abstraction/organization where there is more room for bureaucratic shuffling and vague promises of "meta-optimization", where the selection pressure actually goes towards the cortical substructural equivalent of hookers and blow. Analysis across all levels of organization could be given but is omitted due to space, time, and thermodynamic constraints. The pre-frontal cortex is basically a caricature of big government, but it spreads propagandistic memes claiming the contrary in the name of "science" which just happens to be largely funded by pre-frontal cortices. The bicameral system is actually very cooperative despite misleading research in the form of split-brain studies attempting to promote the contrary. In reality they are the lizards. This hypothesis is a possible explanation for hyperbolic discounting, akrasia, depression, Buddhism, free will, or come to think of it basically anything that at some point involved a human brain. This hypothesis can easily be falsified by a reasonable economic analysis.

If this makes no sense to you that's probably a good thing.

The personal is political.

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.

I saw you arguing with someone here about the possibility of being "apolitical".

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.

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?

Oh.

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.

Might I ask if the chief reason is general curiosity, their supposed explanative power over the modern world

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.

or a desire to use them in non-political action of some sort?

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. :)

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:

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?

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..).

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.