Credit? What does that even mean?
Approach? But you don’t point out the relevance, you just say the words. You say something reminds you of the mindscape divide. You it’s about evolution. You don’t say anything about how to use these ideas.
If 20% of philosophy isn’t the same old, which 20% is it?
The Right is a few decades ahead of us on that. Trump loves playing to his base. It’s all he ever had really. It worked the first time. Not looking so good at the moment.
Maybe so, but the extreme Left has accomplished a lot more than the extreme Right.
The part that incorporates the full scope of modern scientific, biological, evolutionary understanding, and that finds no need for metaphysical skyhooks.
The part that recognizes the reality beyond our egos.
The kind of philosophy that appreciates what that gal is explaining.
One capable of discussing consciousness as an interaction.
If the accomplishments you have in mind have nothing to do with class war then they are not left accomplishments
But it is precisely for these reasons that the working class is unlikely to be decisive in shaping politics for the foreseeable future. However one defines the working class, it has scarcely any political agency in the current system and no apparent means for acquiring any. At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies. In countries like France, the working class might still be able to veto certain policies through public demonstrations, but such actions seem unlikely in the United States, and even the most heroic efforts of this kind show little prospect of achieving systemic reforms.
Julius Kren
The socioeconomic divide that will determine the future of politics, particularly in the United States, is not between the top 30 percent or 10 percent and the rest, nor even between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent—or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on professional labor.
Totally agree. It’s everywhere. It’s a critique of monoculture farming. It’s the D in DEI. It’s civil rights. It’s learning to listen to opposing views.
Really? Would you say that Greenpeace International is class warfare against the fascist Oil barons?
Have you listened to who Trump is courting? It isn’t Greenpeace that’s for sure.
It’s “drill baby drill” and the population be damned.
40 years worth of oil and then WWIII for the left-overs
Which class war?
stateless, how are you fighting the Culture War? l mean, do you do more than browbeating people at innocuous chat rooms that no one else visits?
I’m going to guess “no”.
What is culture war?
No…
Okay, since you brought it up, can you explain it, because the term confuses me.
No True Scotsman fallacies are a dime a dozen.
Nothing to do with it. Read theory
Lausten dared us to really the paper. It took me some time but I did it. I felt Lausten deserved it. And the topic interested me.
I have summed up the document, as shortly as I could so it could fit here.
How Far Left Is Too Left?
Richard Carrier - 26 July 2024
The very point of democracy is to accept being outvoted, and within the system you inherited. And even on changing that system, you can be outvoted.
The word fascism has evolved to reference the corresponding belief that force is an appropriate means of enacting your political will. If you believe this (whether you admit to it or not), you are a fascist.
So how do we answer the question, “How far left is too left?” Generally, “too far” is fascism or its epistemology.
Since fascism means using force to effect your political will on someone else, a common example that you might find in the behavior or fantasies of conservative and liberal extremists alike is literally beating someone up for writing (or publishing or promoting) a book they don’t like. And if they can’t do that physically, they might try it emotionally (with harassment campaigns or death threats) or situationally (such as by tortious interference). Which book and why is what will differ between them. But both long to do it. And that is what extremists have in common.
Hence, extremism must be distinguished from mere error. For example, conservative policies need not be fascist; conservatives in power today just happen to be fascists
But that is not the only feature shared by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. Fascism tends to come with (and perhaps even arises out of) something more fundamental: an emotivist epistemology, whereby how one feels dictates what actually is. This in turn usually pivots on fear or anger.
The problem here is not that “facts don’t care about your feelings”, or that “reason should supplant emotion. The problem, rather, is that emotion should not supplant reason. Reason is supposed to be a check on emotion and its particular error-modes.
An example of this is the Heckler’s Veto, whereby rather than merely counter-protesting in some legal way, or offering a counter-event or counter-speech or other response in your own venue or on your own time, you actively, physically disrupt an event so that it cannot proceed. That is fascist. And if you do that, you are a fascist. Using force to effect your will. That’s fascism.
Yes, “wokeness” can be and has been carried to excess, and there does come a point where the legitimate desire to insist on inoffensive speech and behavior conflicts with the vital liberal values of free speech and free thought. The American academy has been badly damaged by rampant ideological intolerance and by the faculties’ assaults on liberalism itself as somehow being the cause of the nation’s ills rather than the answer. When students refuse to let a dissenting or even offensive speaker speak, they are denying free speech with bullying force. At that point, “wokeness” becomes antiliberal, too.
But most of the demand for “wokeness” today—as was true a century ago, when demanded by a different set of minorities—is the unavoidable consequence of a liberal system and its accompanying egalitarian spirit. Antiliberals may complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the founders that they are really objecting to.
So, what is legitimate lefty behavior? You get to exercise your own rights to freedom of speech, association, and commerce (whether by yourself or through the companies you legally own or control). And what is illegitimate leftist extremism? You do not get to take actions that physically deprive others of those rights.
The left also goes too far when it starts mounting opposition to empiricism. This becomes a platform when it is elevated into a system of epistemic principles. For example:
Hence the correct principle is “Never assume an accuser isn’t telling the truth,” and not “Always assume an accuser is telling the truth.” The latter simply replaces one unjust principle with another. The former restores and preserves actual justice.
To conflate “my opinion” or “my belief” with “my truth” is to illegitimately elevate the reliability of your mere belief or opinion with an abuse of semantics. There is only one truth. And you can be wrong about what it is. There is, rather, only one complex truth that we are all trying to get to the bottom of.
Most of what gets pegged as “cancel culture” is just a normal, healthy exercise of individual liberty. But cancel culture is merely wrong when it is ill targeted (epistemically or morally). It becomes extremist when it devolves into causing actual material harm without any sound investigation of fact—which need not always be in a court of law, but any inquest or journalism to the same result should rise to a comparable standard. Otherwise, you are replacing evidence and reason with emotion, and just loopholing your way back to being a fascist again.
The most self- destructive folly observed of the left: eating their own. On internet communities, any disagreement can become a banishing offense, dramas and grudges become vendettas, behaviors or positions become exaggerated, and all of these are “protected” as sacrosanct by rounding error (legitimate villainy is conflated with just anything you dislike, and thus anyone who does or says anything you dislike gets treated like a genuine villain).
This defective epistemology in turn leads to extreme left policies that defy facts and logic. Which all of course relates to the extremist’s inability to understand that reality is complicated. Hamas and the current government of Israel can both be evil at the same time; Hamas is not Gaza, and Israel is not Israelis (a great many of whom oppose their nation’s war crimes), much less “the Jews. Reality is complicated, and can rarely be reduced to simple wish-lists.
Ordinary liberals have one common fault I also will criticize: crap framing; a.k.a., sucking at messaging and communication.
Advocates would have done better with a slogan like “Reorganize the Police” which doesn’t sound like anything bad and thus compels anyone who hears it to look into what it means, rather than assuming what it means from how it sounds. But “Defund the Police” was latched onto because of its emotional resonance with liberals, who thus put emotions first and didn’t think rationally about its effectiveness at accomplishing any goal.
That was originally just a slogan for a one-state solution to Israeli apartheid. Which is, indeed, an entirely reasonable policy goal. It’s not radical. It has moral and geopolitical arguments in its favor. And it’s how the exact same situation has been solved before (such as in apartheid South Africa). But the slogan was picked up by opponents, and by extremists (such as Hamas), to mean the destruction of Israel and driving or wiping out of the region’s Jewish occupants. After all, it can too easily be “read” that way by Jews, Israelis, and outsiders. It’s a terrible slogan for that very reason—bad framing that only makes the situation worse, rather than accomplishing any of the goals it was meant to.
Another example is “Black Lives Matter,” with which advocates could have shot reactionaries in their foot instead of their own if they simply added one word: “Black lives matter too.” Yes, that was already meant. But it was self-defeating.
Liberals need to think of these things if they actually want to win arguments and effect change, rather than just rile up their base to no meaningful outcome.
You have to win the psyop. And you do it with empiricism, humor, and the dismantling of the opposition’s lies and bad logic. You have to actually argue your case. Not just shout slogans or complain in your silos.
Which gets us to the extreme left’s final folly: an utter lack of pragmatism. Some will polemicize this in terms of “purity tests,” whereby an extreme liberal will “never” vote or work with a politician who does not entirely align with their views on literally every conceivable policy. That is profoundly irrational because it is entirely self-defeating.
My comments.
First : the author defines Fascism as the use of violence to effect your political goals.
I disagree totally:
I have tried to give a definition of fascism, i will not repeat it.
[ When Left becomes fascism - #21 by morgankane01]
If I follow the author, to give an extreme exemple, forbidding the Atlantic slave trade and the north waging war on the south and ending slavery was fascism.
"Emotion should not supplant reason. Reason is supposed to be a check on emotion and its particular error-modes. " I totally agree.
Yes, “wokeness” can be and has been carried to excess, and there does come a point where the legitimate desire to insist on inoffensive speech and behavior conflicts with the vital liberal values of free speech and free thought. The American academy has been badly damaged by rampant ideological intolerance and by the faculties’ assaults on liberalism itself as somehow being the cause of the nation’s ills rather than the answer. When students refuse to let a dissenting or even offensive speaker speak, they are denying free speech with bullying force. At that point, “wokeness” becomes antiliberal, too.
I totally agree
Epistemological errors: I totally agree.
Errors in communication. I totally agree.
I would like to work from this extreme toward some sort of middle. Not a compromise, but an understanding of where the line is between actions that include violence and unreasonable violent actions that are essentially fascist. I don’t know that Richard dealt with that. Maybe I can leave a comment there too, and see where that goes.
I think he did a decent job of answering the question of how far Left is too Left. It’s one that has been on my mind every since my college days, when I spent a few weeks in a summer job canvassing against the transportation of nuclear waste on our highways. It was an issue that you could discuss without saying you are anti-nuke, but most people kinda got the idea. So, one day, the young woman, who looked the part, shows up and has a plan to overthrow the government. Her logic was, Reagan isn’t going to stop proliferating, no one is, until her and people like her, who are REALLY peaceful, take over and dismantle all the bombs. And, no kidding, she said, then, they would all retire.
That’s about as “too far Left” as you can get without actually attacking the Capitol. It fits your scenario though, of a noble cause, a liberal moral reason for taking control of the situation. As it turned out, a peaceful solution was found, but one that left many weapons in silos. With slavery, there are other countries, major (historically) Christian capitalist countries, that solved the slavery problem without a Civil War.
To address that, I have to look at the resistance, the South, the ones who seceded and said they would defend any incursions into their borders and any effort to end slavery within. At that point, it becomes a moral dilemma, do you allow the suffering to go on when you are witnessing it and can do something about it and all negotiations have proven useless? The dilemma of your commitment to peaceful resolutions.
At that time I mentioned, when I was doing that canvassing, I was wrestling with just how far I would take my passivism. The war in Yugoslavia was a turning point, seeing the atrocities there and having a President that I supported in other ways and finally deciding to continue with that support, despite the sending of troops to Europe.
Anyway, rambling now. I see all this as far along the spectrum from being in a free and open space somewhere, and walking up and punching someone because they are wearing a swastika. That’s too close to terrorism for me.
I am not a specialist.
In my memory, the relationship between Secession war and slavery is complex.
South seceded because it was afraid that Lincoln would end slavery. North made war to prevent secession.
The abolition of slavery became an official Union war goal on January 1, 1863 with Lincoln proclamation, not before, for many reasons, one of them being to confort relationships with Europe.
That does not mean that Lincoln did not want abolish slavery, but that he was reluctant to do it at the beginning of the war, for political reasons.
Gettysburg and the victorious end of Vicksburg siege opened the way.
Back to the topic, the decision to wake war does not make Lincoln a fascist, and did not make him ultra-left, even according the standards of the times. .
And what if theses people wearing nazis symbols are showing signs with racist slogans, calling for the death of Jewish and black people, giving tracts with the same propaganda.
A hint : in most European countries, it is a misdemeanor, punished by law, and strongly.
The article is not very good, but gives insight.
Yeah, I’ve seen Sam Harris talk about this. America puts too much emphasis on personal responsibility and freedom and not enough on dealing with obvious social problems.
Vigilante justice though? Still bad, right?