Surprised to see some techcrunch article that appears to be more substantive than just another rewritten fluff piece. But it seems to pushing very much the narrative towards the "racists" angle.
We identify the biodiversity in other species. Don't see why it's a surprise to see the same curiosity in relation to humans. Especially when you see a number of social policies based on ignorance.
That's essentially true but if you don't discuss the views in greater depth "racist" is just used as a conversation stopping epithet. Affirmative Action is racist, but I don't think Tech Crunch would write about that by sneering "racist" and dismissing AA measures.
You are correct assuming ,that in regular speech one uses racism as set of beliefs that people are divided into races.
However, in normal speech racism is defined as believing that human are separated into different races and that there is a hierarchy of superiority, usually with your own race being on top of it.
There is nothing wrong with helping usual target and/or victims of racial or other hate to offset the potential effects said hate. Unless you of course believe safe shelters for women are inherently sexist. In which case you are just old fashioned rasist slash chauvinist.
By that definition the "neo-reactionaries" or HBD advocates under discussion are not racist. The understanding that many differences in group outcomes and metrics in varied dimensions and directions are rooted in DNA, well that says nothing about superiority or inferiority. It can be without value judgment and is empirically falsifiable.
Really, I think your definition is in practice useless. The reality of the word is that when identity politics are involved and people hear something they don't like, they scream "racist".
You can say they don't come up with a hierarchy only by ignoring that they're just fine with the present one and use their racism as the explanation for why it's right and natural.
The salient policy question is really whether or not literally hundreds of billions of dollars should be spent trying to change certain things that probably can barely be changed by spending money. It's not so vicious and mean a thing as you seem to imagine. It's about efficiently dealing with reality.
Here's just one ~$4 billion example of tax payer money spent under the assumption that differences in loan approval rates were racist and not related to other factors.
So your assertion is that (a) hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on antidiscrimination policies or settlement, and (b) that under a HBD regime, we would save this money by simply assuming that disparate outcomes are a result of immutable differences in ability?
Too a large extent they are unfortunately. I think that will be gradually accepted as the costs of genome sequencing fall.
Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. Pages 517-554 in C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Speaking of genome sequencing, if "immutable" and problematic group differences exist, genome sequencing is a crucial step toward making them mutable. (And if they do not exist, genome sequencing will help establish that.)
While many traits are rooted in genetics, the truth is that without enviromental effect genetics differences, probably can't be expressed.
As was evidence by the article on the nature of psychopath psychologist, he didn't commit an act of violence, despite his predisposition of it.
Many, many subtle social effects can contribute to worse performance of subjects.
Likewise I often see 'genetic' argument used to justify the status quo. I.e. the ones in power are in power because they have better genetic material and not just because they are good at exploiting current system or just plain lucky.
Assuming that the present hierarchy of society is mainly due to inherent racial characteristics ... you can say "that's not technically racist", but only by twisting English out of shape.
The article was weak, but when you've got a school of thought that considers "ethnonationalists" an important part of it[1], it's difficult to escape the conclusion that most of its practicioners are racist, or at least consider many forms of racism to be less pernicious than liberalism.
Especially when your non-ethnonationalists include the likes of Steve Sailer...
On that basis the Dalai Lama is too, as is Benjamin Netanyahu. It seems its human nature around the world to want to protect/preserve your culture and society.
To the best of my knowledge, the Dalai Lama has never written blogs calling for the hanging of the corpses of Ed Kennedy et al. for the "genocidal and traitourous" act of abolishing race-specific quotas on immigration (ironically, a nation which "Sarah Maid of Albion" doesn't even live in) or participate vicariously in the fantasy of shooting back people with "I am George Zimmerman" memes in the manner of "Unamusement Park's" series of posts celebrating the murder of Trayvon Martin.
“To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.”
Ergo why the elite love democracies - they hold the power and keys while the people think they're the ones in control.
Privatize the gains, publicize the losses.
Divide and conquer the people through the illusory red team versus blue team paradigm, all the while everyone is robbed blind with nary a hope for real change.
Life for the average person worldwide has improved substantially more in the liberal era (1700-now, roughly) than in any other span of time in recorded history. I have yet to hear any reactionary explain what suffering or harm people are suffering now that will be solved by their alternative systems. Instead, I just see blanket claims that we are obviously being duped, abused and robbed.
It's a good question. I guess freedom comes from things like "limited government" and "pluralism", not directly from democracy, and maybe those things are more important than actually letting the people rule themselves -- for an individual person, the notion of their vote being a meaningful voice in a democratic government is kind of a fantasy anyway. But there's not really any better guarantees of freedom under any other system.
The whole "let's have lots of micro-states with easy exit" condition proposed by these advocates here sounds borderline quasi-plausible, IF somehow you could get that going to begin with (not bloody likely)... but even from a purely economic perspective, the transaction costs in choosing a new place to live and moving there are very high, so one would suspect this layout would lead to inefficient results. (and that's economic efficiency, which includes your overall well-being.) And who enforces that you get to up and leave whenever you want, anyway? The other micro-states, using WAR?
How about no states? I just subscribe to the protection agency I like, no need to move, nobody claiming arbitrary sovereignty over a whole geographic area. This is a less common type of legal system than whatever flavor of statism but societies like this existed and maintained civil order for centuries.
No, a state is a territorial monopoly. There might be some local/state/federal hierarchy, but whatever place you live in everyone has the same "stack". There's studies that show police in monopoly systems wait and respond to crime much more often than actively patrolling and preventing crime.
A polycentric legal order would have people living in one area who might subscribe to any number of different private security and arbitration firms.
But how would they enforce the laws you subscribe to without having people with guns in your general vicinity willing to do violence on your behalf, and what's the value if you're not interacting with people who subscribe to the same?
Perhaps you could say their different agencies come to some sort of an agreement in regards to disputes or conflicts between the laws subscribed to by different people. But where such agreements exist they would be made for the mutual benefit of the corporations and not necessarily their customers. To me the end result still looks a lot like a state, just one in which cartels stand in for governments.
The micro state idea is problematic. Most modern examples are effectively parasites on the surrounding nations. Singapore and Lichtenstein do tax evasion and money laundering for a living. They also skim talented people off other countries.
The big problem with the micro state idea is military power. Much of the stability apparent in the modern world is really down to the military might of regional powers. Leaving libertarian fantasy land of peacefully trading small states, what seems more probable and historically accurate is feuding for supremacy by any means.
Despite all the computer oriented techno wankery around here, the biggest value of the continental United States is still the Mississippi watershed. Anyone who controls it will be a world power. You can't realistically break it up into stable micro states.
I do wonder whether by 'freedom' some people mean 'absolute personal freedom' rather than the greatest freedom for the greatest number.
Now it is true that a right of absolute personal freedom is incompatible with democracy, but it is also incompatible with pretty much all other forms of political structure, not to mention most physical laws, the existence of birth and death, and everyone else's right of absolute personal freedom.
Also, about the 'easy exit' conditions, I do wonder who is going to tell the royals to stick to the conditions if they decide to ban folk from leaving a particular state.
I am an anarchist libertarian. So is [Hans] Herman Hoppe mentioned in the article. He has a book called Democracy the God That Failed where he makes some comparisons between monarchy and democracy, but he is not a monarchist.
You can easily get the "Tyranny of the majority" under some democratic systems, particularly with direct voting on particular laws. You need a balance where you have freedom for unpopular subgroups in the population but sufficient checks on these subgroups so that they don't get up to anything too wrong. Democracies, if they are too responsive to popular opinion, can be easily swayed by impulsive movements and the press. Democracy isn't a single idea, so the type of democracy affects the freedom in the land.
Obviously any sort of power, democratic or not, is against "freedom" in the general sense. In reality, you need some sort of power structure, so the question is whether the democratic one is better than any other.
Most people who put a lot of emphasis on the alleged conflict between freedom and democracy seem to assume a laughably simplistic definition of democracy taken straight out of early-to-mid-20th-century political philosophy. Basically, when they say "democracy", they mean "majority rule". And of course, if getting 51% of the vote were all there was to democracy, I would wholeheartedly agree that it's a nasty thing.
But political philosophy is one of the fastest moving sub-disciplines of philosophy, and most people who take philosophy and/or political theory courses in the first 2 years of college (or read introductory books by themselves) are unfortunately not given a real taste of the latest developments in democratic theory. This makes them pick up an outdated, straw-man notion of democracy (anybody read Robert Dahl?) and argue passionately against it. But if that's what they're doing, they aren't really adding anything to what Schumpeter said 60 years ago. What a waste of precious brain cycles.
Most influential political philosophers of the English-speaking world in the last half century (Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas) refuse to equate democracy with "obey whomever 51% of the population votes for". To them, democracy is all about giving the voice of reason a chance to be heard, even if it means departing from political systems that currently pass for democracies. They usually call for much more powerful constitutional constraints on democracy so that the most important human rights become extremely difficult to override even if you have a supermajority. Like all tools, democracy needs to be limited in its scope. If you have a hammer... you know how it goes.
You summoned me with your comment above so I feel compelled to respond to this interesting comment.
I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.
One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.
"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.
As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.
Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)
I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.
EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An eve...
So here's a non-hypothetical question that I don't know the answer to: if Charles Murray was a Singaporean who tried to publish a popular book (as opposed to a purely academic paper, which was to be non-publicized and behind a paywall, etc...) that states that Malays and Indians have a lower average IQ than Chinese (and that this determined primary by hereditary genetics and unlikely to change in the long term), would he face more or less obstacles in Singapore than he did in US? My intuition says that he would be prohibited to publish in Singapore and possibly face fines and/or jail time (especially without political connections). I think this has an actual answer (have there been similar cases before? I would be surprised if there weren't), however, but alas I am too lazy to look.
In regards to paternalism (laws regulating personal safety, nutrition, private health, family relations, etc...) I also believe Singapore tends to fare worse, even if it's manifested in different ways (e.g., there may not be laws against trans fat, but there is compulsory military service, near impossibility of being allowed to live alone in an apartment, extreme difficulty of private car ownership -- which moots the discussion of car seats, etc...). As I a firearm owner, I find California (where I live) and New York gun laws to be idiotic -- but I'm pretty sure my "collection" (couple of rifles and a pistol) would mean death penalty in Singapore.
I think one place where you may have a point is the case of entitlements: it is indeed rare for democracies to have significantly cut some aspects welfare state, namely middle-class entitlement like medicare and social security (welfare programs for the truly poor do get cut frequently, but they are actually less fiscally burdensome than the middle class entitlement).
However, there have been cases of other regulations being significantly loosened, e.g., airline deregulation is something I am quite grateful for.
> The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it ... political ideals aren't real. They don't matter.
> people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists ... have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code.
Interesting observation, and yeah, it definitely smells like Marx. But I'd say it's too early to reach a conclusion like that. It's not unusual for mainstream philosophical ideas of X'th century to have little impact on the real world until well into X+1'th century or even later, and that's under favorable socioeconomic circumstances.
Similarly, programming language theory debated on the Haskell lists tends to "trickle down", after a while, into various other languages and frameworks. 10 or 20 or 30 years later, someone writes a PHP framework that is indirectly inspired by some of them. It takes time, that's all.
I'd be very surprised if political ideas developed in the 1990s, for example, came to fruition anytime before 2090 or so. And the same applies to the neoreactionary ideas of the 2000s. Even if they're as promising as their advocates say they are, it's going to take no less time to port them to the real world. So I don't think your impatience is justified.
> a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone
Ah, the usual baseless romanticism about the past. This is what I find the most disagreeable about neoreactionaries. If you want to build a better future, leave your unrealistic notions of history at the door.
> b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
Did you actually go back in time and ask them whether they really enjoyed it? Or are you just trying to force everyone else to be "free" (hello, Rousseau) regardless of whether they want to be?
I don't have any problem with a bunch of consenting adults who want to build their own country in the middle of an ocean. It's their money and their own lives to spend as they see fit. But I don't think anybody has the right to drag a single non-consenting person into a copy of Plato's ideal city.
Most people are just fine being comfortable serfs in an industrial society, whether you like it or not. And that's what really prevents the speedy implementation of any political philosophy, whether yours or mine. As I see it, you're not really trying to fix this issue, but merely rewrite history to make it look like a non-issue. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise, but good luck getting your rewritten history merged into Upstream Reality.
The word "democracy" is used a lot. Usually people aren't mindful of what an arbitrary term like democracy represents in context. They have static perception. Unfortunately, due to the way a lot of these subjects are taught, most people seem to grow up believing that [governmental change in support of human freedom/justice] has reached its climax, that the end-all-be-all form of it has effectively been reached. People then fail to care about seeking even the simplest of changes to the system itself. They stay mentally contained to a philosophical box.
The US federal system as it now stands in loose terms, for instance, is a centralized, binary, non-preferential democratic republic. Paired with its form of taxation, this system has resulted in one of the most top-heavy, enriched, powerful, imprisoning, corporate oligarchical-like governments the world has known. Wars of luxury start happening with relative ease, just as they did under more totalitarianism and deluded republics. The feeding frenzy has never been better. As long as its "citizenry" is lulled into believing in an "enemy" and doesn't have to feel the weight of its violent force that affects others, this will continue. They'll keep throwing their own freedom and that of their neighbor down the drain in support of revenge, clinging to the hopes of another election. One of the only ways to conscientiously object peacefully is the withdrawal of funding, opting for social NGOs instead. Even that is a colossal task. A simple nonviolent action against the status quo of taxation may land a person caged.
Neomonarchism:
Neomonarchism as a reaction to a growing [corporate-war-prison-surveillance state (sprinkled with democracy)] doesn't make much logical sense. I doubt most neomonarchists want more freedom. Anyone who wants more freedom and liberation should tread in the other direction: away from these extremely centralized, top-heavy systems of today and yesteryear. To empower individuals more is to effectively disempower the ability of individuals and groups to rule over one another (who rule at the hand of a sword or by laws inherently backed by violence).
Even if you're not that interested in neoreactionary stuff, reading the linked anti-reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander [1] is quite interesting. Fair warning though - it's huge.
I'm actually a monarchist, but not like this. I just believe the current political system of Canada is strong and shouldn't change into a republic. I've never even heard of this movement. I hope I never have to again.
It's actually a really interesting question, and to answer it I'll need to give a whirlwind explanation of the Canadian political system, since it is quite intricate and different from the American. It's hard to say really what would happen. The Crown (The Queen of Canada, although for all intents and purposes it really means the Governor-General) is an incredibly powerful position. The royal prerogatives, which are not really written down anywhere, since the Canadian (as well as the British) constitution is partially unwritten and based on convention, include appointing ministers (including the Prime Minister) and dismissing them at will, as well as calling and dissolving Parliament, declaring war, signing bills into law through Royal Assent, etc.
Conventionally, though, these powers are used only through the advice of the Prime Minister, since the Prime Minister has some degree of democratic legitimacy (although interestingly enough, the Prime Minister is not elected directly by the people. The Prime Minister is Prime Minister only because he is the leader of the party that was chosen by the Crown to form government) and the Crown does not, since the Governor-General is appointed by the Monarch, with the advice of the Prime Minister, and the Monarch is obviously a hereditary position. Now, if the Crown were given democratic legitimacy, say through an elected head of state, suddenly the position is empowered and the stability of the system is called into question. Maybe the Crown decides not to sign a bill into law, or dismisses a minister, or dissolves Parliament for no reason, the Crown could say that he (or she) has the mandate of the people to do so, which is obviously bad for the country.
I'm not saying its necessarily bad for the Crown to be empowered like that, just that the system is stable and strong as it is, and it is not broken, so why fix it? It throws a lot of the political system into question and unbalances the delicate balance of our constitution.
There's a big difference, of course, which is that Canada already has a monarchy (of a very limited kind) on top of a democratic system, with stable institutions, a high level of general prosperity, and the rule of law. Being in favour of retaining a working system isn't reactionary.
It's called a constitutional monarchy and is quite common in Europe (if that isn't obvious).
A few I can remember with constitutional monarchy: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
What I find quite ironic is that today in the British Common Wealth, the combination of an almost symbolic monarch, and parliamentary rule leads to -- in practice -- far less centralization of in the hands of the executive branch in comparison to presidential republics such as United States.
What's more troubling is that there's very little history of constitutional monarchies reverting to absolutism and staying that way for a long time. On the other hand, many post-Soviet USSR republics (including Russia) provide plenty of democratic presidents turning into dictators.
Two or three clicks away from the Urbit homepage you can get to any number of charming screeds about how the United States is communist and how scientific racists are being persecuted by the communist power structure, etc.
About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained.
I wonder if they've put "Cathedral" into the HN-search, got some cathedral and bazaar-discussions, and concluded the royalists hang out on HN... after all, why would tech-folks talk about cathedrals otherwise, right?
So they exist. Not sure how widespread it is, but I would also imagine that it's a larger group than would be apparent simply because most folks don't want to out themselves as "anti-democratic" the most ultimate of sins.
Not quite fair to label someone a 'royalist' who self-describes as:
"I've settled on parvumianism (to coin a neologisim): in favor of small political units in which the appropriate political mechanism can be chosen and meaningfully consented to."
Well since the poster advocated reading "Democracy the God that failed" which specifically posits that monarchy is a better system (Based on it's incentive structure), I would say that is about as close as you can get. Only when I disagreed with the extremity did the poster make up his new term.
I think you are right though that it would be incorrect to label anyone as anything unless they explicitly stated as such.
I found the book an interesting and compelling critique of democracy, which I grew up without questioning, but I'm not a monarchist.
I'm fairly agnostic about the best way to organize politically, beyond coming to the conclusion that if a government is to meaningfully derive its powers from the consent of the governed, then, depending on how strong a culture there is, there can't be very many governed.
So the organizers and crowd behind Singularitarian movement got bored, so they moved on to Sea-steading, life extension through 'that one crazy trick' and other Paleotarian claptrap. And now, they've jumped that shark too.
Michael Anissimov was quietly dismissed from MIRI - I imagine it had something to do with his political views, that or his complete lack of technical expertise.
MIRI has quite the history of shape shifting and hiring inexperienced CEOs - the list of which you can't find unless you know the history, so here it is: Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov, Luke Muehlhauser. None of them have anything close to management experience.
Peter Thiel is behind a good proportion of anything these individuals want to do which is interesting in and of itself to me.
To his credit, Luke is pretty much kicking arse now he's in the job. I've seen what not-so-great charity CEOs are like (I have many decades' experience in sub-competent charities of various varieties) and Luke's sheer energy is just what MIRI needed.
Yes, they want a monarchy, as long as they get to be peers. I don't see them saying "working as a wage-slave is fondest goal" - that would be for the other people.
I can't speak for any neo-monarchists but the thing I see the most is the theory of eliminating the wage slave all together through automation and a basic income. I don't think those goals are by virtue in conflict with democracy but I can see how they could be.
Whether you agree with it's plausibility or not, I think that in and of itself is a worthy goal.
I've seen stuff like this on both sides. It's what happens when one's desire for change and despair at trying to get the vulgar masses to the self evident "right" thing drives them to misanthropy. It's a misanthropy that sees the rise Leninist vanguard revolutionaries, or Straussian nocturnal councils. Or every armchair revolutionary on the Internet, on any side, who has ever furiously stamped on his keyboard the hoary phrase "Wake up SHEEPLE!"
It is the person who cannot convince the world of their position, and then comes to the conclusion the problem is the world.
This post reminds me of my problems with reading sites like Zerohedge. They're right about a few things, including severe structural issues in the current monetary system. But as soon as I hit the word 'SHEEPLE', I immediately close the browser tab and stop reading. The word strikes me as intellectually lazy on several levels, and this is certainly one of them.
I've heard about Leo Strauss, and his influence on neoconservatism, but do nocturnal councils actually exist, or are they a hypothetical philosophical idea? A far-right equivalent to vanguard revolutionaries would be interesting.
In theory, democracy can be a somewhat workable system. (I wouldn't say robust but workable.)
In practice, at least in the last many decades, we have seen what happens when special interest groups get to write their own laws and regulations behind the scenes...often getting voted on in Congress before there's time to even read the bills.
Maybe the solution is to somehow 'democratize' the special interest groups? Well, I've basically advocated for awhile now that we need a larger group of representatives. (it seems ridiculous to expect a few hundred elected lawmakers to regulate the government.
Either that or we just need smaller government but if we want the government to regulate as much as it does in modern times, it's going to continue evolving as technology and industries evolve and that's one reason why special interest groups have gained so much power. They serve a purpose in government. It's just not transparent and 'refereed' like it should be.
It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.
It does. And investigating why geeks are into HBD or nootropics could probably be an interesting article. I wondered about it. Maybe you could even take a look where this disappointment with the regular media/science/gov is coming from.
this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.
Haha. Or inflate your own importance and call people racist. That will probably, and sadly, get even more clicks (while fuelling disapointment with the media).
Using the word 'racist' is inflammatory and often seems to be an affront, so I can appreciate your disappointment with the author.
However, I don't see how many 'human biodiversity' (HBD) claims are not racist - that is, they make claims about individuals based on the social construct of race though they ostensibly mean to discuss 'biology.'
They seriously talk about "African" as if it were a tight genetic grouping (like Icelanders or Ashkenazim) - Africa has the greatest human genetic diversity per distance of anywhere, as one would expect (diversity per distance is greatest near the point of origin).
What I find amazing is that people are surprised that group differences have arisen over the last 50,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution makes it seem inevitable that different cultures will favor different traits. Therefore you're going to see some average differences.
There are obvious examples, a more polygamous society where women do more of the work (eg female farming systems) with lower paternal investment, might favor different traits to those where there is State control, monogamy and greater paternal investment.
I'd recommend that you read some posts by Steve Hsu, Peter Frost, or 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution'.
My disappointment is that it stopped at "racists." Because it brings up a more interesting question of why a geek sitting in front of a computer, out of a thousand topics and million cats, chose to investigate IQ differences between populations. And it went far beyond idle curiosity.
Here was his chance to actually shed some light "on the psyche of contemporary tech culture."
Same with the popularity of nootropics. I know of very few groups (body builders, athletes, and geeks may actually be the only ones) so interested in boosting performance. This is interesting. Shed the light on the psyche.
Does those two tie into the disappointment with the mainstream news and opinion outlets, contemporary scientific institutions, and governance? I'd venture a yes.
Isn't that interesting? Just to me?
Maybe I'll write that article one day then. His loss.
They do in point of fact espouse scientific racism, a couple of steps down the euphemism treadmill (scientific racialism -> race realism -> human biodiversity)
That this makes them cross the moral event horizon for many people does not make it (a) unimportant or (b) untrue.
The problem with Kings and Queens is that even the best ones expire after a while (... but maybe not, if you believe the transhumanists) and the replacement tends to be even less accountable than the Presidents and Prime Ministers of today's governments are.
If you get Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius all in the same century, you're lucky. You could have just as easily gotten five Neros and five Caligulas in a row, or an alternating series of Catholics and Protestants who try to kill everyone who was loyal to the previous monarch.
With a democracy, you can't optimize the society to the same degree of perfection as you can with philosopher kings, but you also get to avoid the worst crashes. Do you want extreme performance or do you want reliability? Hint: human lives are supposed to be many times more important than records in your database.
>With a democracy, you can't optimize the society to the same degree of perfection as you can with philosopher kings, but you also get to avoid the worst crashes.
A great point; I like to think of Democracy as median filtering, it smooths extremes.
“What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life.”
"And a magical flying unicorn pony that ejaculates rainbows." When we actually get a donkey with an ice cream cornetto smooshed onto its head, wings nailed on and it's been fed laxatives and food colouring. So yeah, software requirements documents.
Seems like a reaction (no pun intended) to a false dilemma: either unlimited direct democracy (majoritarianism) and equality of outcomes or unlimited monarchy and lack of what is termed "equality of liberty" (every individual is treated equally before the law).
Whenever I hear someone who claims to like liberty preach against democracy in favour of reaction and monarchy, I feel they miss that when classical liberal enlightenment thinkers (who were the first to speak of individual liberty, advocate for free trade, property rights, and abolition of compulsory membership in guilds) critized democracy, the word democracy didn't mean what it means today: it meant direct and unlimited Athenian-style democracy, that lead to Socrates' death.
To add to this, they mistake traditionalism/conservatism of Edmund Burke (in a way, the intellectual founding father of the US republican party and modern Tories) who happened to criticize French revolution with actual continental reactionary politics (of Hegel, Metternich, De Maistre, etc...) Here's a tendency to explain Burke's support of American Revolution followed by opposition to the French revolution for a change in his views: in reality, they were consistent -- he was appalled by the Jacobins, but supported constitutional law, equality of freedom (arguing for emancipation of Catholics and against imperialism/subjugation of India), and so forth...
When reactionaries speak against democracy they do so for entirely different reasons than when US founding fathers (or the philosophers that inspired them) warned against democracy. The reasons reactionary thinkers from Plato onwards despised democracy had more to do with the fact that they saw democratic cities as having _too much_ freedom. They absolutely despised private property, trade, and the middle/upper-middle classes (all of which are likely sacred with these neo-reactionaries).
Their idea of monarchy was far more similar to Byzantine absolutism, as opposed to constitutional monarchy of e.g., Franz Josef of Austro Hungarian Empire (who, incidentally, also despised nationalism and presciently saw it as an incredibly destructive force) or even "enlightened absolutism" of Fredrick The Great.
So here's a "radical" thought: despite all of its flaws, limited (de-facto or de-jure) constitutional government (a.k.a. "rule of law" in English speaking countries, and "rechstaat" in German speaking countries), genuine social _and_ economic liberalism (aka "classical liberalism"), and democracy have (overall) greatly increased human liberty, happiness, and productivity. There's tons of rooms for debate -- but I'd imagine most honest left-liberals would much prefer to live in, e.g., US under Reagan or UK under Thatcher than in Fidel's Cuba, while most honest libertarians/conservatives would much prefer to live in social-democratic countries of Western Europe/Scandinavia than in Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, or Chile under Pinochet[1]. Conservatives may wax enthusiastically about low taxes in semi-authoritarian Singapore, but I'm not sure if that enthusiasm would continue if they realized that the country also punishes firearm possession by death.
Personally, I hope that a broader centrist liberal party emerges in the US (which would also include libertarians as part of its big tent coaliation -- Reagan and Thatcher parroted libertarian ideas, while expanding perhaps most anti-libertarian agenda, namely the War On Drugs). The NSA spying scandal was awful, but one of its results was the begging of a left-right coalition focused on civil liberties.
So in all, I think the idea that rule by a new generation of philosopher kings will somehow make us more free seems silly: it's ease to get caught up in the aesthetics of the idea, but it's bizzare to think as to how this may actually strengthen the rights to life, liberty, and property.
[1] Obviously all sane people would not want to ...
I'm sorry, I tried to read that and figure out a point, but it was nearly impossible. I suggest fewer parenthetic phrases, and maybe a thesis statement somewhere?
Criticism of democracy as "mob rule" don't really apply to modern meaning of democracy. Absolute monarchy (or other types of absolute government) will -- in practice -- lead to far less actual liberty than we see today.
Most of the people I know, that lived back in the day, openly say that life under the previous regime was better. A lot better.
Obviously, members of the current oligarchy, trade union professionals and members of the current parties, always try to pass across Estado Novo as some sort of totalitarian nightmare, forgetting that they at the time most of them were pushing for die-hard communism. The country these people looked up to as a model was communist Albania...
The 2nd Portuguese Republic started as military dictatorship. In 1933 it became a constitutional system, with a constitution sanctioned by popular vote. Contrary to what people normally think, Salazar wasn't the head of State. The head of State was the President of the Republic - elected by popular vote up to the fifties, by which time the system changed to an electoral college, due to communist sabotage and violent agitation during the presidential elections.
The PoR was elected for seven year periods and had the power to appoint the Government, particularly the President of the Council of Ministers (Prime-minister). That's how things worked when Salazar died: the President consulted whomever he saw fit and decided to appoint Marcello Caetano, which, by the way, had a leftist reputation in more conservative circles. There were three Presidents during the 2nd Republic.
Salazar proposed his own resignation a few times to the Presidents. However, Salazar was an absolutely brilliant statesman, besides being an extremely competent and scrupulous with money and finances. He single-handedly assumed the jobs of the ministries of War and Foreign Affairs during the 2nd World War. It's him Portugal owes being saved from that catastrophe. To an extent so does Spain. The people loved him and that is undeniable. Even recently, no more than ten years ago, there was a silly tv show to the purpose of electing the greatest portuguese person of all times. Salazar won. This is hard to understand without knowing the state of the country left by the 1st Republic. A lot of people became salazarists because of the simple fact that they started to get their pensions paid regularly.
Anyway, as far as repression goes, it's undeniable that censorship existed. For several reasons it was never abolished, even though there were plans for it. In the establishment of the regime, it was deemed necessary to control agitation and maintain order. Then came World War 2, an extremely delicate situation that warranted the control provided by press censorship to maintain the cooperative neutrality with the Allies Salazar wanted. Then, when finally there seemed to be a glimpse of an opening in the 50s, started the soviet and chinese-sponsored terrorist operations in Angola, with the 1961 massacre in the North.
Beyond this point, press censorship was used mainly control enemy propaganda, which was mainly all communist.
Still it was a known fact and the government didn't hide it or denied it. Compare this to the sort of veiled censorship practiced in the UK but especially in America, in matters pertaining the wars in which they recently were involved.
Salazar, and other important figures of the 2nd Republic, weren't against democracy as such. They were against parliamentary democracy with parties. They were against political parties and were against control of the executive branch by the legislative branch. They felt the stability and long-term vision necessary to govern a country can't be provided by changing governments and policy every four years. I think they were right. Reality proves so, at least in the case of Portugal.
That doesn't mean they didn't felt popular legitimation unimportant. Like I said, the President was elected, and so were the deputies of the National Assembly. The difference was that the government didn't have to have a majority in this assembly to govern. The trust of the President was enough.
This isn't more widely known because of communist propaganda. What people ...
To be honest, I did hesitate to include Salazar in the same list as even Pinochet, much less Franco or Castro: it was never totalitarian or substantially fascist, less authoritarian than many regimes in Latin America, and certainly far less authoritarian than People's Republic that were setup in its former colonies.
I clearly understand what you said about leftist in US vs. leftist elsewhere as well: both the republicans and democrats in the US would in many countries be more akin to a fairly tiny party that called itself liberal and had only a few seats in the parliament (e.g., in today's Russia the entire US political spectrum would likely fall into Yavlinsky's party/list which hasn't had any seats at all in the Duma since 2007).
Given a choice between communism (even communism under a "progressive" cloak -- Venezuela is a clear example of how that played out!) and Salazar, I also think that most reasonable people would pick Salazar in a heartbeat. Communism and socialism almost by definition require totalitarianism, which is why the last remaining totalitarian state is North Korea, with other states getting progressively less authoritarian in lockstep to them becoming less communist. Chinese citizens are for the most part more free than Cubans -- e.g., Chinese and Vietnamese citizens are permitted to leave their countries, while immigration is extremely difficult for any Cuban medical doctor. Cubans, however, are more free today than my family was under Kruschev and Brezhnev -- my parents couldn't even travel to other communist countries for scientific conferences until 1989.
However, I was not comparing Estado Novo to its alternatives at the time in Portugal or even the current mess (I believe one of the leaders of the coup against Caetano said that he wouldn't have overthrown him if he saw what came out in the end): what I see as an example of "decent" social democracy would be Sweden -- private property and capitalism, but with a somewhat more expansive welfare state. To be clear I do not in any way endorse an expansive welfare state: the taxation needed to sustain such a state chokes businesses (I am not at all surprised that Volvo is owned by Ford and Saab by GM) and the handouts create artificial externalities which ultimately lead to less individual liberty ("we gave you free healthcare, so now we will regulate what you, what you smoke, and force you [as in France] to see a doctor on a routine basis").
I also realize that this isn't a fair comparison: 1930s Portugal was a multi-ethnic state with overseas colonies, yet with living conditions (in terms of literacy, standard of living, but perhaps not infrastructure) even in metropolitan Portugal that resembled today's developing world. To compare it with a highly homogeneous and wealthy Scandinavian country of today is indeed quite absurd.
The colonial wars also complicate things quite a bit -- I personally do find it ironic that Portugal was condemned for them, while France (which acted with greater brutality both in its colonies and against domestic dissent) got a free pass.
I also do not in any way mean to slight the enormous advances in standard of living that happened under Estado Novo, as well as neutral Portugal's role as an escape route for refugees.
Yet, the "neo-reactionaries" are for the most part Americans which is what I find insane: Western-style liberal democracy is an unattainable dream for most. I first learned the word liberalism from my grandmother, who described it as only a faint memories from her grandfather -- a merchant of first guild (highest title that could be held by a Jewish capitalist) in Imperial Russia -- who supported a liberal party in 1905. I find it crazy that any American or North-West European would want to give that system up for the neo-ancien regime.
None of the Portuguese I know have that view, and they come from a fairly broad spectrum of contemporary Portuguese politics. Salazar's regime was virulently anti-education and pro-feudalism, in favor of keeping all but a small educated elite in poverty as uneducated peasants. The dictatorship deliberately kept the vast majority of the population from having access to education, to the extent that Portugal had the 2nd-lowest high-school completion rate in Europe, after Malta. Salazar's goal was a nation of illiterate farmers who he and his corrupt cronies could profit from. Not corrupt, you say? Who built all those giant estates during the Estado Novo? It sure wasn't people advancing of their own merit. They were simple thieves wearing jewels and pretentious titles.
I don't know any Portuguese today who thinks that Portugal was better off under the previous incompetent kleptocracy. They may have objections to today's government, but Salazar was both malevolent and stupid, a particularly poor combination.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadHowever, in normal speech racism is defined as believing that human are separated into different races and that there is a hierarchy of superiority, usually with your own race being on top of it.
There is nothing wrong with helping usual target and/or victims of racial or other hate to offset the potential effects said hate. Unless you of course believe safe shelters for women are inherently sexist. In which case you are just old fashioned rasist slash chauvinist.
Really, I think your definition is in practice useless. The reality of the word is that when identity politics are involved and people hear something they don't like, they scream "racist".
Here's just one ~$4 billion example of tax payer money spent under the assumption that differences in loan approval rates were racist and not related to other factors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/farm-loan-bias-claims-o...
Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. Pages 517-554 in C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.
www.edge.org/response-detail/10376
As was evidence by the article on the nature of psychopath psychologist, he didn't commit an act of violence, despite his predisposition of it.
Many, many subtle social effects can contribute to worse performance of subjects.
Likewise I often see 'genetic' argument used to justify the status quo. I.e. the ones in power are in power because they have better genetic material and not just because they are good at exploiting current system or just plain lucky.
Especially when your non-ethnonationalists include the likes of Steve Sailer...
[1]http://habitableworlds.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/visualizing-...
Ergo why the elite love democracies - they hold the power and keys while the people think they're the ones in control.
Privatize the gains, publicize the losses.
Divide and conquer the people through the illusory red team versus blue team paradigm, all the while everyone is robbed blind with nary a hope for real change.
It's a handful of loud mouthed guys who have the phone number of a reporter who was looking for an article to write.
The whole "let's have lots of micro-states with easy exit" condition proposed by these advocates here sounds borderline quasi-plausible, IF somehow you could get that going to begin with (not bloody likely)... but even from a purely economic perspective, the transaction costs in choosing a new place to live and moving there are very high, so one would suspect this layout would lead to inefficient results. (and that's economic efficiency, which includes your overall well-being.) And who enforces that you get to up and leave whenever you want, anyway? The other micro-states, using WAR?
A polycentric legal order would have people living in one area who might subscribe to any number of different private security and arbitration firms.
Perhaps you could say their different agencies come to some sort of an agreement in regards to disputes or conflicts between the laws subscribed to by different people. But where such agreements exist they would be made for the mutual benefit of the corporations and not necessarily their customers. To me the end result still looks a lot like a state, just one in which cartels stand in for governments.
The big problem with the micro state idea is military power. Much of the stability apparent in the modern world is really down to the military might of regional powers. Leaving libertarian fantasy land of peacefully trading small states, what seems more probable and historically accurate is feuding for supremacy by any means.
Despite all the computer oriented techno wankery around here, the biggest value of the continental United States is still the Mississippi watershed. Anyone who controls it will be a world power. You can't realistically break it up into stable micro states.
Now it is true that a right of absolute personal freedom is incompatible with democracy, but it is also incompatible with pretty much all other forms of political structure, not to mention most physical laws, the existence of birth and death, and everyone else's right of absolute personal freedom.
Also, about the 'easy exit' conditions, I do wonder who is going to tell the royals to stick to the conditions if they decide to ban folk from leaving a particular state.
Obviously any sort of power, democratic or not, is against "freedom" in the general sense. In reality, you need some sort of power structure, so the question is whether the democratic one is better than any other.
Most people who put a lot of emphasis on the alleged conflict between freedom and democracy seem to assume a laughably simplistic definition of democracy taken straight out of early-to-mid-20th-century political philosophy. Basically, when they say "democracy", they mean "majority rule". And of course, if getting 51% of the vote were all there was to democracy, I would wholeheartedly agree that it's a nasty thing.
But political philosophy is one of the fastest moving sub-disciplines of philosophy, and most people who take philosophy and/or political theory courses in the first 2 years of college (or read introductory books by themselves) are unfortunately not given a real taste of the latest developments in democratic theory. This makes them pick up an outdated, straw-man notion of democracy (anybody read Robert Dahl?) and argue passionately against it. But if that's what they're doing, they aren't really adding anything to what Schumpeter said 60 years ago. What a waste of precious brain cycles.
Most influential political philosophers of the English-speaking world in the last half century (Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas) refuse to equate democracy with "obey whomever 51% of the population votes for". To them, democracy is all about giving the voice of reason a chance to be heard, even if it means departing from political systems that currently pass for democracies. They usually call for much more powerful constitutional constraints on democracy so that the most important human rights become extremely difficult to override even if you have a supermajority. Like all tools, democracy needs to be limited in its scope. If you have a hammer... you know how it goes.
I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.
One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.
"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.
As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.
Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)
I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.
EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An eve...
In regards to paternalism (laws regulating personal safety, nutrition, private health, family relations, etc...) I also believe Singapore tends to fare worse, even if it's manifested in different ways (e.g., there may not be laws against trans fat, but there is compulsory military service, near impossibility of being allowed to live alone in an apartment, extreme difficulty of private car ownership -- which moots the discussion of car seats, etc...). As I a firearm owner, I find California (where I live) and New York gun laws to be idiotic -- but I'm pretty sure my "collection" (couple of rifles and a pistol) would mean death penalty in Singapore.
I think one place where you may have a point is the case of entitlements: it is indeed rare for democracies to have significantly cut some aspects welfare state, namely middle-class entitlement like medicare and social security (welfare programs for the truly poor do get cut frequently, but they are actually less fiscally burdensome than the middle class entitlement).
However, there have been cases of other regulations being significantly loosened, e.g., airline deregulation is something I am quite grateful for.
> people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists ... have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code.
Interesting observation, and yeah, it definitely smells like Marx. But I'd say it's too early to reach a conclusion like that. It's not unusual for mainstream philosophical ideas of X'th century to have little impact on the real world until well into X+1'th century or even later, and that's under favorable socioeconomic circumstances.
Similarly, programming language theory debated on the Haskell lists tends to "trickle down", after a while, into various other languages and frameworks. 10 or 20 or 30 years later, someone writes a PHP framework that is indirectly inspired by some of them. It takes time, that's all.
I'd be very surprised if political ideas developed in the 1990s, for example, came to fruition anytime before 2090 or so. And the same applies to the neoreactionary ideas of the 2000s. Even if they're as promising as their advocates say they are, it's going to take no less time to port them to the real world. So I don't think your impatience is justified.
> a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone
Ah, the usual baseless romanticism about the past. This is what I find the most disagreeable about neoreactionaries. If you want to build a better future, leave your unrealistic notions of history at the door.
> b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
Did you actually go back in time and ask them whether they really enjoyed it? Or are you just trying to force everyone else to be "free" (hello, Rousseau) regardless of whether they want to be?
I don't have any problem with a bunch of consenting adults who want to build their own country in the middle of an ocean. It's their money and their own lives to spend as they see fit. But I don't think anybody has the right to drag a single non-consenting person into a copy of Plato's ideal city.
Most people are just fine being comfortable serfs in an industrial society, whether you like it or not. And that's what really prevents the speedy implementation of any political philosophy, whether yours or mine. As I see it, you're not really trying to fix this issue, but merely rewrite history to make it look like a non-issue. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise, but good luck getting your rewritten history merged into Upstream Reality.
The word "democracy" is used a lot. Usually people aren't mindful of what an arbitrary term like democracy represents in context. They have static perception. Unfortunately, due to the way a lot of these subjects are taught, most people seem to grow up believing that [governmental change in support of human freedom/justice] has reached its climax, that the end-all-be-all form of it has effectively been reached. People then fail to care about seeking even the simplest of changes to the system itself. They stay mentally contained to a philosophical box.
The US federal system as it now stands in loose terms, for instance, is a centralized, binary, non-preferential democratic republic. Paired with its form of taxation, this system has resulted in one of the most top-heavy, enriched, powerful, imprisoning, corporate oligarchical-like governments the world has known. Wars of luxury start happening with relative ease, just as they did under more totalitarianism and deluded republics. The feeding frenzy has never been better. As long as its "citizenry" is lulled into believing in an "enemy" and doesn't have to feel the weight of its violent force that affects others, this will continue. They'll keep throwing their own freedom and that of their neighbor down the drain in support of revenge, clinging to the hopes of another election. One of the only ways to conscientiously object peacefully is the withdrawal of funding, opting for social NGOs instead. Even that is a colossal task. A simple nonviolent action against the status quo of taxation may land a person caged.
Neomonarchism:
Neomonarchism as a reaction to a growing [corporate-war-prison-surveillance state (sprinkled with democracy)] doesn't make much logical sense. I doubt most neomonarchists want more freedom. Anyone who wants more freedom and liberation should tread in the other direction: away from these extremely centralized, top-heavy systems of today and yesteryear. To empower individuals more is to effectively disempower the ability of individuals and groups to rule over one another (who rule at the hand of a sword or by laws inherently backed by violence).
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa...
Conventionally, though, these powers are used only through the advice of the Prime Minister, since the Prime Minister has some degree of democratic legitimacy (although interestingly enough, the Prime Minister is not elected directly by the people. The Prime Minister is Prime Minister only because he is the leader of the party that was chosen by the Crown to form government) and the Crown does not, since the Governor-General is appointed by the Monarch, with the advice of the Prime Minister, and the Monarch is obviously a hereditary position. Now, if the Crown were given democratic legitimacy, say through an elected head of state, suddenly the position is empowered and the stability of the system is called into question. Maybe the Crown decides not to sign a bill into law, or dismisses a minister, or dissolves Parliament for no reason, the Crown could say that he (or she) has the mandate of the people to do so, which is obviously bad for the country.
I'm not saying its necessarily bad for the Crown to be empowered like that, just that the system is stable and strong as it is, and it is not broken, so why fix it? It throws a lot of the political system into question and unbalances the delicate balance of our constitution.
A few I can remember with constitutional monarchy: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
What's more troubling is that there's very little history of constitutional monarchies reverting to absolutism and staying that way for a long time. On the other hand, many post-Soviet USSR republics (including Russia) provide plenty of democratic presidents turning into dictators.
I hang out on HN fairly often and haven't seen a single royalist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965530
Other than that, I agree that HN just looks like a healthy mix of democrats, (crypto-)libertarians, and an occasional conservative.
Kind of put a different light on the whole thing.
http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html
About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6729736
So they exist. Not sure how widespread it is, but I would also imagine that it's a larger group than would be apparent simply because most folks don't want to out themselves as "anti-democratic" the most ultimate of sins.
"I've settled on parvumianism (to coin a neologisim): in favor of small political units in which the appropriate political mechanism can be chosen and meaningfully consented to."
I think you are right though that it would be incorrect to label anyone as anything unless they explicitly stated as such.
I'm fairly agnostic about the best way to organize politically, beyond coming to the conclusion that if a government is to meaningfully derive its powers from the consent of the governed, then, depending on how strong a culture there is, there can't be very many governed.
What a circus.
Peter Thiel is behind a good proportion of anything these individuals want to do which is interesting in and of itself to me.
http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/10070-guidelines-for-na...
Geeks tried very patiently to explain mathematics to him in the comments.
Whether you agree with it's plausibility or not, I think that in and of itself is a worthy goal.
It is the person who cannot convince the world of their position, and then comes to the conclusion the problem is the world.
Btw, there was a prime minister of Bulgaria who was also a king by birthright. Talk about elective monarchy.
In practice, at least in the last many decades, we have seen what happens when special interest groups get to write their own laws and regulations behind the scenes...often getting voted on in Congress before there's time to even read the bills.
Maybe the solution is to somehow 'democratize' the special interest groups? Well, I've basically advocated for awhile now that we need a larger group of representatives. (it seems ridiculous to expect a few hundred elected lawmakers to regulate the government.
Either that or we just need smaller government but if we want the government to regulate as much as it does in modern times, it's going to continue evolving as technology and industries evolve and that's one reason why special interest groups have gained so much power. They serve a purpose in government. It's just not transparent and 'refereed' like it should be.
It does. And investigating why geeks are into HBD or nootropics could probably be an interesting article. I wondered about it. Maybe you could even take a look where this disappointment with the regular media/science/gov is coming from.
this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.
Haha. Or inflate your own importance and call people racist. That will probably, and sadly, get even more clicks (while fuelling disapointment with the media).
However, I don't see how many 'human biodiversity' (HBD) claims are not racist - that is, they make claims about individuals based on the social construct of race though they ostensibly mean to discuss 'biology.'
What I find amazing is that people are surprised that group differences have arisen over the last 50,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution makes it seem inevitable that different cultures will favor different traits. Therefore you're going to see some average differences.
There are obvious examples, a more polygamous society where women do more of the work (eg female farming systems) with lower paternal investment, might favor different traits to those where there is State control, monogamy and greater paternal investment.
I'd recommend that you read some posts by Steve Hsu, Peter Frost, or 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution'.
Here was his chance to actually shed some light "on the psyche of contemporary tech culture."
Same with the popularity of nootropics. I know of very few groups (body builders, athletes, and geeks may actually be the only ones) so interested in boosting performance. This is interesting. Shed the light on the psyche.
Does those two tie into the disappointment with the mainstream news and opinion outlets, contemporary scientific institutions, and governance? I'd venture a yes.
Isn't that interesting? Just to me?
Maybe I'll write that article one day then. His loss.
That this makes them cross the moral event horizon for many people does not make it (a) unimportant or (b) untrue.
If you get Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius all in the same century, you're lucky. You could have just as easily gotten five Neros and five Caligulas in a row, or an alternating series of Catholics and Protestants who try to kill everyone who was loyal to the previous monarch.
With a democracy, you can't optimize the society to the same degree of perfection as you can with philosopher kings, but you also get to avoid the worst crashes. Do you want extreme performance or do you want reliability? Hint: human lives are supposed to be many times more important than records in your database.
A great point; I like to think of Democracy as median filtering, it smooths extremes.
Whenever I hear someone who claims to like liberty preach against democracy in favour of reaction and monarchy, I feel they miss that when classical liberal enlightenment thinkers (who were the first to speak of individual liberty, advocate for free trade, property rights, and abolition of compulsory membership in guilds) critized democracy, the word democracy didn't mean what it means today: it meant direct and unlimited Athenian-style democracy, that lead to Socrates' death.
To add to this, they mistake traditionalism/conservatism of Edmund Burke (in a way, the intellectual founding father of the US republican party and modern Tories) who happened to criticize French revolution with actual continental reactionary politics (of Hegel, Metternich, De Maistre, etc...) Here's a tendency to explain Burke's support of American Revolution followed by opposition to the French revolution for a change in his views: in reality, they were consistent -- he was appalled by the Jacobins, but supported constitutional law, equality of freedom (arguing for emancipation of Catholics and against imperialism/subjugation of India), and so forth...
When reactionaries speak against democracy they do so for entirely different reasons than when US founding fathers (or the philosophers that inspired them) warned against democracy. The reasons reactionary thinkers from Plato onwards despised democracy had more to do with the fact that they saw democratic cities as having _too much_ freedom. They absolutely despised private property, trade, and the middle/upper-middle classes (all of which are likely sacred with these neo-reactionaries).
Their idea of monarchy was far more similar to Byzantine absolutism, as opposed to constitutional monarchy of e.g., Franz Josef of Austro Hungarian Empire (who, incidentally, also despised nationalism and presciently saw it as an incredibly destructive force) or even "enlightened absolutism" of Fredrick The Great.
So here's a "radical" thought: despite all of its flaws, limited (de-facto or de-jure) constitutional government (a.k.a. "rule of law" in English speaking countries, and "rechstaat" in German speaking countries), genuine social _and_ economic liberalism (aka "classical liberalism"), and democracy have (overall) greatly increased human liberty, happiness, and productivity. There's tons of rooms for debate -- but I'd imagine most honest left-liberals would much prefer to live in, e.g., US under Reagan or UK under Thatcher than in Fidel's Cuba, while most honest libertarians/conservatives would much prefer to live in social-democratic countries of Western Europe/Scandinavia than in Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, or Chile under Pinochet[1]. Conservatives may wax enthusiastically about low taxes in semi-authoritarian Singapore, but I'm not sure if that enthusiasm would continue if they realized that the country also punishes firearm possession by death.
Personally, I hope that a broader centrist liberal party emerges in the US (which would also include libertarians as part of its big tent coaliation -- Reagan and Thatcher parroted libertarian ideas, while expanding perhaps most anti-libertarian agenda, namely the War On Drugs). The NSA spying scandal was awful, but one of its results was the begging of a left-right coalition focused on civil liberties.
So in all, I think the idea that rule by a new generation of philosopher kings will somehow make us more free seems silly: it's ease to get caught up in the aesthetics of the idea, but it's bizzare to think as to how this may actually strengthen the rights to life, liberty, and property.
[1] Obviously all sane people would not want to ...
Criticism of democracy as "mob rule" don't really apply to modern meaning of democracy. Absolute monarchy (or other types of absolute government) will -- in practice -- lead to far less actual liberty than we see today.
Most of the people I know, that lived back in the day, openly say that life under the previous regime was better. A lot better.
Obviously, members of the current oligarchy, trade union professionals and members of the current parties, always try to pass across Estado Novo as some sort of totalitarian nightmare, forgetting that they at the time most of them were pushing for die-hard communism. The country these people looked up to as a model was communist Albania...
The 2nd Portuguese Republic started as military dictatorship. In 1933 it became a constitutional system, with a constitution sanctioned by popular vote. Contrary to what people normally think, Salazar wasn't the head of State. The head of State was the President of the Republic - elected by popular vote up to the fifties, by which time the system changed to an electoral college, due to communist sabotage and violent agitation during the presidential elections. The PoR was elected for seven year periods and had the power to appoint the Government, particularly the President of the Council of Ministers (Prime-minister). That's how things worked when Salazar died: the President consulted whomever he saw fit and decided to appoint Marcello Caetano, which, by the way, had a leftist reputation in more conservative circles. There were three Presidents during the 2nd Republic.
Salazar proposed his own resignation a few times to the Presidents. However, Salazar was an absolutely brilliant statesman, besides being an extremely competent and scrupulous with money and finances. He single-handedly assumed the jobs of the ministries of War and Foreign Affairs during the 2nd World War. It's him Portugal owes being saved from that catastrophe. To an extent so does Spain. The people loved him and that is undeniable. Even recently, no more than ten years ago, there was a silly tv show to the purpose of electing the greatest portuguese person of all times. Salazar won. This is hard to understand without knowing the state of the country left by the 1st Republic. A lot of people became salazarists because of the simple fact that they started to get their pensions paid regularly.
Anyway, as far as repression goes, it's undeniable that censorship existed. For several reasons it was never abolished, even though there were plans for it. In the establishment of the regime, it was deemed necessary to control agitation and maintain order. Then came World War 2, an extremely delicate situation that warranted the control provided by press censorship to maintain the cooperative neutrality with the Allies Salazar wanted. Then, when finally there seemed to be a glimpse of an opening in the 50s, started the soviet and chinese-sponsored terrorist operations in Angola, with the 1961 massacre in the North. Beyond this point, press censorship was used mainly control enemy propaganda, which was mainly all communist. Still it was a known fact and the government didn't hide it or denied it. Compare this to the sort of veiled censorship practiced in the UK but especially in America, in matters pertaining the wars in which they recently were involved.
Salazar, and other important figures of the 2nd Republic, weren't against democracy as such. They were against parliamentary democracy with parties. They were against political parties and were against control of the executive branch by the legislative branch. They felt the stability and long-term vision necessary to govern a country can't be provided by changing governments and policy every four years. I think they were right. Reality proves so, at least in the case of Portugal. That doesn't mean they didn't felt popular legitimation unimportant. Like I said, the President was elected, and so were the deputies of the National Assembly. The difference was that the government didn't have to have a majority in this assembly to govern. The trust of the President was enough.
This isn't more widely known because of communist propaganda. What people ...
I clearly understand what you said about leftist in US vs. leftist elsewhere as well: both the republicans and democrats in the US would in many countries be more akin to a fairly tiny party that called itself liberal and had only a few seats in the parliament (e.g., in today's Russia the entire US political spectrum would likely fall into Yavlinsky's party/list which hasn't had any seats at all in the Duma since 2007).
Given a choice between communism (even communism under a "progressive" cloak -- Venezuela is a clear example of how that played out!) and Salazar, I also think that most reasonable people would pick Salazar in a heartbeat. Communism and socialism almost by definition require totalitarianism, which is why the last remaining totalitarian state is North Korea, with other states getting progressively less authoritarian in lockstep to them becoming less communist. Chinese citizens are for the most part more free than Cubans -- e.g., Chinese and Vietnamese citizens are permitted to leave their countries, while immigration is extremely difficult for any Cuban medical doctor. Cubans, however, are more free today than my family was under Kruschev and Brezhnev -- my parents couldn't even travel to other communist countries for scientific conferences until 1989.
However, I was not comparing Estado Novo to its alternatives at the time in Portugal or even the current mess (I believe one of the leaders of the coup against Caetano said that he wouldn't have overthrown him if he saw what came out in the end): what I see as an example of "decent" social democracy would be Sweden -- private property and capitalism, but with a somewhat more expansive welfare state. To be clear I do not in any way endorse an expansive welfare state: the taxation needed to sustain such a state chokes businesses (I am not at all surprised that Volvo is owned by Ford and Saab by GM) and the handouts create artificial externalities which ultimately lead to less individual liberty ("we gave you free healthcare, so now we will regulate what you, what you smoke, and force you [as in France] to see a doctor on a routine basis").
I also realize that this isn't a fair comparison: 1930s Portugal was a multi-ethnic state with overseas colonies, yet with living conditions (in terms of literacy, standard of living, but perhaps not infrastructure) even in metropolitan Portugal that resembled today's developing world. To compare it with a highly homogeneous and wealthy Scandinavian country of today is indeed quite absurd.
The colonial wars also complicate things quite a bit -- I personally do find it ironic that Portugal was condemned for them, while France (which acted with greater brutality both in its colonies and against domestic dissent) got a free pass.
I also do not in any way mean to slight the enormous advances in standard of living that happened under Estado Novo, as well as neutral Portugal's role as an escape route for refugees.
Yet, the "neo-reactionaries" are for the most part Americans which is what I find insane: Western-style liberal democracy is an unattainable dream for most. I first learned the word liberalism from my grandmother, who described it as only a faint memories from her grandfather -- a merchant of first guild (highest title that could be held by a Jewish capitalist) in Imperial Russia -- who supported a liberal party in 1905. I find it crazy that any American or North-West European would want to give that system up for the neo-ancien regime.
I don't know any Portuguese today who thinks that Portugal was better off under the previous incompetent kleptocracy. They may have objections to today's government, but Salazar was both malevolent and stupid, a particularly poor combination.