Often we do not really want to take a set of ideas & scrub & steelman it to make it an “ideal” theory. Often what we need to do is to strawman it. Then we can see what the stakes truly are—how the...
Just finished reading Corey's book last night. And I was simply gobsmacked by the crap that comes from the pens of many of the conservative creeps. I now think philosophy is one of the most over-rated disciplines in the academy so I need Nietzche interpreters. It's odd to me that very off base creatures like Nietzche and Heidegger haven't been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Note that between the mid-'Twenties and their gaining power the National Socialists shed as much of the 'socialist' as they could, making them much more acceptable to the industrialist backers who flocked to them and the reactionary/militarist forces who thought they could use them to get their own way. (The Strassers balked, and were soon dead or in exile; Röhm met the long knives mostly out of fear of his power, but also to reässure the military that the S.A., who had stayed redder, would be kept in check.)
In Italy, the Fascists made peace with the Church, and I don't know that the industrialists ever were worried about them, but I might just be ignorant of such if they had been.
I understand this as the reason for some of the antipathy to "Neoliberalism," that in practice it mainly meant tax cuts for high-income people; "We'll get around to attracting high value immigrants and Pigou taxation and well financed social insurance and regulation by CBA and YIMBYism and progressive taxation of consumption one of theses days."
Your posting on Holbo raises a lot of issues. Since you teach at Berkeley, you could have mentioned the Free Speech Movement which caused Governor Brown to call out the National Guard. Brown was a Democrat, but according to Holbo he was a closet conservative. The Free Speech Movement was a response to a proposed restriction on students rights to speech.
There have been some Supreme Court cases where the nominally conservative justices have removed restrictions on speech. Buckley v. Vallejo held that an individual cannot be barred from using his own money to finance his political campaign . The richest politician in America, Illinois Governor Pritzker, a billionaire, used his money to finance his campaigns. He characterizes himself as a liberal. The Citizens United case held that a corporation can contribute to political speech, again decided by the nominally conservative justices.
I've been writing on the issue of whether or not a libertarian is a conservative. I take it that libertarians would not prevent expression except in narrow circumstances.
Brown was said to rush to change his registration from R to D after Roosevelt won. Not a closet R but a close watcher of which way the wind is blowing.
I class them with conservatives because I believe their programme would preserve or exacerbate most of the important property/power-relations most people regularly encounter…to those who have much, much will be given. They seem to be split between those who do not believe that such would be so—'Freed from the State, the Market will often bring down the high and raise up the low.' and those who think those now wealthy even in our very State-polluted system have generally got there by dint of manifest superiority, and so their continued or increased power were a _feature_.
* The 'practical conservatisms'ʼ convergences seems to me to be described by (what is called) 'Wilhoitʼs Law'.
*Robin, quoted:
'
What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.
'
That 'seems' could imply delusion on the conservative's part, but if a partial loss were meant—not the total loss of 'Forbidding sexual harassment means weʼre all in the Gulag!'—this seems on the conservative's own terms rational. This is particularly relevant to any freedom involving a good that seems limited, like land or power—a generous U.B.I. frees you but limits my ability to make you dance for pennies.
"Vector sums", eh? By an amazing coincidence, Hilarious Bookbinder just posted the observation that once you know to look for it, you can see Simpson's Paradox everywhere.
Larry Wasserman made two under-rated comments about Simpson's Paradox. The first is that you cannot talk coherently about Simpson's Paradox without causal language. Here I take your causal claim to be that the unifying aspect of the "vector sum" of liberalism or conservatism or whatever is the cryptic agenda which causes people to write in a given vein.
Wasserman's second comment was that explanations commonly read as if the conditioned (disaggregated) probabilities were the *right* ones. But of course that is only true when A) conditioning on a confounder which B) is the only confounder. If there is no confounder, then conditioning *causes* confounding and the unconditioned (aggregate) probability is correct. I take your claim to be that conditioning on the specific argument of some liberal or conservative writer is tantamount to conditioning on a non-confounder.
But there is a third possibility: you are correctly conditioning on a confounder, but there are other, unobserved, confounders. In that case both the unconditioned and conditioned probabilities are meaningless. In my opinion, that is the situation that obtains here.
On the other hand, "Vavilovian" puns with both "Pavlovian" and "Varangian", which is pretty great.
I wonder if anybody could hum a few more bars on socialism. Brad's "victory of the envious" seems to leave a bit out. Rawls' minimax could be called socialist (esp. by a liberal), but doesn't seem particularly envious to me. I'm not sure about "exaltation of the leader" on fascism, either. It contains a lot of truth, but omits irrationalism and masculinism.
Shorter: Conservatism is based on two lies. The superiority of the elite and everything else they say to defend that lie.
Just finished reading Corey's book last night. And I was simply gobsmacked by the crap that comes from the pens of many of the conservative creeps. I now think philosophy is one of the most over-rated disciplines in the academy so I need Nietzche interpreters. It's odd to me that very off base creatures like Nietzche and Heidegger haven't been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Note that between the mid-'Twenties and their gaining power the National Socialists shed as much of the 'socialist' as they could, making them much more acceptable to the industrialist backers who flocked to them and the reactionary/militarist forces who thought they could use them to get their own way. (The Strassers balked, and were soon dead or in exile; Röhm met the long knives mostly out of fear of his power, but also to reässure the military that the S.A., who had stayed redder, would be kept in check.)
In Italy, the Fascists made peace with the Church, and I don't know that the industrialists ever were worried about them, but I might just be ignorant of such if they had been.
I understand this as the reason for some of the antipathy to "Neoliberalism," that in practice it mainly meant tax cuts for high-income people; "We'll get around to attracting high value immigrants and Pigou taxation and well financed social insurance and regulation by CBA and YIMBYism and progressive taxation of consumption one of theses days."
But then how DO we promote those things?
Your posting on Holbo raises a lot of issues. Since you teach at Berkeley, you could have mentioned the Free Speech Movement which caused Governor Brown to call out the National Guard. Brown was a Democrat, but according to Holbo he was a closet conservative. The Free Speech Movement was a response to a proposed restriction on students rights to speech.
There have been some Supreme Court cases where the nominally conservative justices have removed restrictions on speech. Buckley v. Vallejo held that an individual cannot be barred from using his own money to finance his political campaign . The richest politician in America, Illinois Governor Pritzker, a billionaire, used his money to finance his campaigns. He characterizes himself as a liberal. The Citizens United case held that a corporation can contribute to political speech, again decided by the nominally conservative justices.
I've been writing on the issue of whether or not a libertarian is a conservative. I take it that libertarians would not prevent expression except in narrow circumstances.
Allen Kamp
Brown was said to rush to change his registration from R to D after Roosevelt won. Not a closet R but a close watcher of which way the wind is blowing.
I class them with conservatives because I believe their programme would preserve or exacerbate most of the important property/power-relations most people regularly encounter…to those who have much, much will be given. They seem to be split between those who do not believe that such would be so—'Freed from the State, the Market will often bring down the high and raise up the low.' and those who think those now wealthy even in our very State-polluted system have generally got there by dint of manifest superiority, and so their continued or increased power were a _feature_.
* The 'practical conservatisms'ʼ convergences seems to me to be described by (what is called) 'Wilhoitʼs Law'.
*Robin, quoted:
'
What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.
'
That 'seems' could imply delusion on the conservative's part, but if a partial loss were meant—not the total loss of 'Forbidding sexual harassment means weʼre all in the Gulag!'—this seems on the conservative's own terms rational. This is particularly relevant to any freedom involving a good that seems limited, like land or power—a generous U.B.I. frees you but limits my ability to make you dance for pennies.
"Vector sums", eh? By an amazing coincidence, Hilarious Bookbinder just posted the observation that once you know to look for it, you can see Simpson's Paradox everywhere.
Larry Wasserman made two under-rated comments about Simpson's Paradox. The first is that you cannot talk coherently about Simpson's Paradox without causal language. Here I take your causal claim to be that the unifying aspect of the "vector sum" of liberalism or conservatism or whatever is the cryptic agenda which causes people to write in a given vein.
Wasserman's second comment was that explanations commonly read as if the conditioned (disaggregated) probabilities were the *right* ones. But of course that is only true when A) conditioning on a confounder which B) is the only confounder. If there is no confounder, then conditioning *causes* confounding and the unconditioned (aggregate) probability is correct. I take your claim to be that conditioning on the specific argument of some liberal or conservative writer is tantamount to conditioning on a non-confounder.
But there is a third possibility: you are correctly conditioning on a confounder, but there are other, unobserved, confounders. In that case both the unconditioned and conditioned probabilities are meaningless. In my opinion, that is the situation that obtains here.
On the other hand, "Vavilovian" puns with both "Pavlovian" and "Varangian", which is pretty great.
I wonder if anybody could hum a few more bars on socialism. Brad's "victory of the envious" seems to leave a bit out. Rawls' minimax could be called socialist (esp. by a liberal), but doesn't seem particularly envious to me. I'm not sure about "exaltation of the leader" on fascism, either. It contains a lot of truth, but omits irrationalism and masculinism.
Before the collapse of Crooked Timber, I enjoyed John's posts.