Our leaders want to create a new world in which nobody is mean.
(By “mean,” I mean “cruel,” not “average.”)
But this is impossible. Meanness cannot be eliminated. Just telling people “Stop being mean!” doesn’t work. So our leaders have decided to be mean to the mean people, in the name of anti-meanness, in the hope that this will stop the mean people from being mean.
And since being mean is to them a sin, our leaders don’t acknowledge that they’re being mean. In their own eyes, they’re not sinners. So they can’t be mean.
This makes them meaner, because they don’t recognize, and therefore seek to control, their own meanness. Their meanness isn’t meanness. It’s goodness.
And, of course, when ordinary people emulate our leaders’ meanness, they’re being good too.
Our leaders also want to create a new world in which nobody believes in truth or goodness. People who believe in truth and goodness care about truth and goodness. This makes them mean to the people who don’t care about truth or goodness, or who oppose truth or goodness. Can’t have that.
So in order to eliminate meanness, we have to be mean to the mean without admitting it, and we have to hate truth and goodness, because these are the ultimate cause of most meanness. And that means that we have to hate God, because He is the ultimate truth and goodness.
Welcome to the modern world.
Postscript
You have to live in the modern world, but you don’t have to agree with it. You can disagree. You can say silently to yourself “That’s wrong.” This is the beginning of sanity.
The Orthosphere 
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Traditional people want to live in a world without murder. But this is impossible. Murder cannot be eliminated. Just telling people “Stop murdering!” doesn’t work. So our leaders have decided to murder the murderers, in the name of anti-murder.
Since God exists, capital punishment is the just penalty for murder. It is not murder.
Duh (nothing to do with God though). And “meanness” directed by a legitimate government to correct the “meanness” of others is also not of the same order as arbitrary “meanness”.
If I have to spell it out for you — anyone who believes that there is such a thing as legitimate government (I guess that is a point where we might agree) also acknowledges that the government has certain powers that ordinary citizens don’t have. So Alan’s original point that “meanness” by “leaders” is self-contradictory is nonsense.
TFB calls the formless one’s attention to the following: “The owners of a Christian bakery who refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple are facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines after they were found guilty of violating the couple’s civil rights.
“The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries said they found ‘substantial evidence’ that Sweet Cakes by Melissa discriminated against the lesbian couple and violated the Oregon Equality Act of 2007, a law that protects the rights of the LGBT community.” (Fox News website 21 January 2014)
The above is what Alan is referring to when he writes of the liberal war on “meanness.” Liberals are so fanatically intent on assimilating everyone’s conscience to their own distorted conscience that they will violate the Thirteenth Amendment to force dissenters to work for people who demand their labor, and who threaten to ruin, and indeed mercilessly bring to ruin by legal shenanigans, those who refuse to labor for them. America is full of haters, to be sure. They are liberals. Apparently I need to spell it out for you.
[http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/21/christian-bakery-guilty-violating-civil-rights-lesbian-couple.html]
I meant, for example, the government persecuting (perhaps through proxies) people who are “mean” to homosexuals. Or to women’s rights. Or to abortionists. Or to divorcees. Or to “undocumented workers.” etc.
It’s not “self-contradictory nonsense.” The meanies are persecuted for the official reason that they make other people feel bad. The government does not acknowledge, for example, that homosexuality is to be honored. It only says that people who oppose the legitimization of homosexuality are “creating a hostile environment” which hurts the feelings of certain people. Officially, we traditionalists are guilty of the crime of making people feel bad. Of being meanies.
Of course, anyone who pays attention to the world knows this. My comment here is just the for record, because the Formless One is either not honest or not paying attention.
Never mind, apparently my point is too abstract for this audience.
“Never mind.” The Formless One has never expressed his formlessness so candidly. “Too abstract.” What a laugh. “Audience.” What a laugh. (TFB)
Still, I find it curious that a bunch of traditionalists, who presumably believe in authority, would be making arguments more suitable to anarchists. Either the government has the power to use force (“be mean”) to enforce its laws, or it doesn’t. If it does, then it also has the power to say what those laws are, including prohibiting ordinary people from being “mean”.
What is the difference, do tell us, between “power” and “authority”? Will you give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s when Caesar demands everything? We will not – we distinguish between power and authority – so call us anarchists, please. (TFB)
If you don’t like the laws, feel free to lobby to have them changed — that’s what the gays did. But you can’t object to the very concept of government force, unless of course you are anarchists…are you?
We object to a government that endlessly empowers itself. So, yes, thank you, we’re anarchists. (TFB)
“If you don’t like the laws, feel free to lobby to have them changed.” Certainly, that’s what we should do. You Kulaks – if you don’t like the laws, feel free to lobby to have them changed. And you Jews, ditto. And you, who are being marched out of Phnom Penh to the killing fields, ditto again. (TFB)
Not much. There is all kinds of power; authority is power that has managed to legitimize itself to the point where it doesn’t have to rely directly on physical coercion. It’s power that has deeply infiltrated the minds of the governed.
This applies just as much to the modern democratic state as to the monarchies you folks like to romanticize. The specifics of how legitimation is achieved are different; the general process is the same.
Really? I think you are confused about what anarchism means. Objecting to a particular government or form of government does not qualify you for the label.
Succinct and yet very much a correct diagnosis. We must point out that nature is mean. The order of things is mean. Even God is mean. Because the Modern definition of mean can be summed up as that which affirms an objective truth, and therefore an objective falsehood. Nobody should be convicted of objective falsehood because that would be mean.
The hypocrisy of our enemies being ‘intolerant of the intolerant’ so to speak goes right over their heads. I just addressed this point in an article I wrote today. They operate under the ‘illusion of neutrality’. Conclusions that exclude themselves from their own system so that they preside as judges are justified because they see themselves as neutral arbiters of political and cultural disputes, not biased actors peddling a diseased ideology.
I am sick of hearing any Christian trying to make the case that ours is a religion of tolerance. It is not. A religion that fits the warped definition of tolerance crafted by these cretins is not a religion at all, but rather a bridge club with less comfortable seating. It is high time the faithful ceased trying to make our ways palatable to the Modernist, who is more enthralled to demonic forces than the attendants of a Canaanite infant sacrifice ritual.
Modernity is in its very essence, evil. And as such we will fight it like one fights off a viral infection. If that makes us mean, then let us be mean without measure. The truth is ruthless against falsehood. Against truth, falsehood must surely perish.
Hence the phrase: Make the way straight for the Lord. Another apt phrase for this thread is, Get thee behind me, Satan!
True, they want a world where nobody is mean (cruel) and want to achieve this world by making everyone mean (average or, in this case, base).
Very true!
As the Formless one says, Christians are anarchists. The arche is sacrifice. Christians renounce sacrifice. Liberals embrace it, like the charming same-sex couple in Oregon who decided to ruin a family – and all the “nice” people who helped them do it. Everyone is “nice” in the “progressive” world, including the ones who deprive families of a livelihood.
A.morphous has a point: there is such a thing as legitimate government, and legitimate government has powers that men do not, and may rightly do some things that men may not rightly do on their own recognizance.
Alan’s point was however not that government authority is unjust, but rather that the use of government authority to prevent hurt feelings is insane, and incoherent, in that society cannot proceed at all, on any front, except by decisions that each injure someone or other. Thus in the first place the persecution of meanness cannot ever succeed, in the second it cannot but be totalistic, and totalitarian, arrogating to itself all power even over tiny private decisions (e.g., whether parents will be allowed to read to their children), and in the third it can proceed only by way of mean persecutions.
The state’s effort to eradicate murder may fail, but it is not insane. Its attempt to eradicate hurt feelings is completely nuts, and cannot therefore be just. Only that which can actually be performed can possibly be just. To try to do what cannot be done is eo ipso unjust. And a government that is *essentially* unjust cannot be legitimate, cannot be lawful (this being the meaning of “legitimate”); for, it cannot conform itself properly to the just krasis of reality, and cannot therefore enact or enforce true laws, except happenstantially, by mischance or through ignorance, incompetence, carelessness or oversight; it can do justice only by failing.
To the modern liberal totalitarian state, which would immolate all sorts of traditionalists as haters, the traditionalist response, as Professor Bertonneau says, is counterrevolution, first toward a calcining anarchy, and then to a renascence of a humane traditional order.
That’s us now, a.morphous. Not you. You are now, and have been for at least 50 years, the Establishment oppressor of the working man, and the wrecker of all he holds dear. You think the rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore are angry at us? No. The policies that formed them are yours. They are angry at you.
This is put remarkably well. One of the drawbacks I have noticed with Conservatives is they ALWAYS see themselves as the establishment. You can see it when they say things like “this is a Christian country!” or “Liberals are hijacking America!”
No, you simple-minded fools. Liberals ARE America. The entire West is in its very essence, Liberal. We need to start dispossessing the left of their illusory traits, including neutrality and the ‘anti-establishment’.
“This is put remarkably well.” Seconded!
Obviously Kristor didn’t need to explain to us what Alan meant in the post, but I’m glad he took the time to explain it to the formless one, and amazingly without returning his condescending attitude.
Well, thanks for at least understanding and acknowledging what I was trying to say.
Well, that wasn՚t exactly his point as I read it. Insofar as that is his point and it is true, I actually agree. I don՚t think the government has the job of preventing hurt feelings. The trend to try to eliminate them (which mostly seem to be on campuses, not by actual government action) I think is a bad one.
Uh, what?
I really have no idea what you are talking about.
[AR: If we publicly disagree with the campaign to legitimize homosexuality, for example, and especially if we quote Scripture on the subject or “hurt somebody’s feelings,” then we’re considered fair game for all sorts of punishment. That’s what we’re talking about.]
You can՚t get a more pure form of “hater” than the late Fred Phelps and his crew. They were not “immolated”, but freely permitted to spew their hatred all over the place, including the liberal streets of San Francisco and the funerals of soldiers (that last one challenged my personal commitment to free speech, but the law held). So, it sounds like you are not complaining about “immolation” or any action of the state, but the fact that people are being mean to you because of your beliefs. Projection, as usual – it՚s you guys who are exercised about meanness and want to ban it.
[AR: The Phelps gang are indeed haters, but it’s questionable to call them traditionalists. They’re more like thugs who espouse some traditionalist views. And it is likely that the Left refuses to put them out of business because they seem to make traditional morality look bad. Sort of like the Hitler-was-a-Christian-in-good-standing meme. “If the Phelps gang didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them…”]
Once again, I have no clue what you are talking about.
What the working man probably holds most dear is the ability to keep on working. The shift of jobs overseas has been rooundly supported and enabled by both political parties, and may be an inevitable aspect of capitalism. If you want to be an anarchist and enemy of capitalism, be my guest; you might have to dress in black and get some tattoos.
You had not heard about Professor Adam Swift yet? He’s just opened the next front in the culture wars: the horrible unfairness created by the fact that some parents read to their children. It sounds like something from the Onion, but you really can’t make this stuff up as fast as the Left comes up with it in all seriousness. Home schooling is illegal in many European countries, and they’ll take your kids away from you if you try to do it. In a country where home schooling is illegal, why should reading to your kids be legal? Now that Swift has asked the question, it will be answered: it shouldn’t. Count on it.
Wow, you haven’t read about the destruction of careers and businesses suffered by those who didn’t want to support gay “marriage”? You haven’t heard that the Solicitor General admitted to the Supreme Court that if gay “marriage” were found to be constitutional, then Catholic institutions could lose their tax-exempt status? They’d be sued, too, of course, just like the bakers and photographers.
The immolation is figurative, but real nonetheless. Pretty soon, you’ll be perfectly free to express your opinion that gay “marriage” is not marriage, but if you do you’ll never work in this nation again. Go ahead! Express your opinions! Feel free!
To say the state is not involved in punishing ‘haters’ is ludicrous. The myriad anti-discrimination laws prove this, without even having to go to the loony localities that have banned anyone with discriminatory views from even running for public office.
And what is to be said about the rest of the West? This just in from the hyper Modernist kakistocracy known as Britain:
Yes, that TOTALLY doesn’t sound like state involvement in the anti-meanness campaign. Its practically a call to arms for a borg collective
“A.morphous has a point: there is such a thing as legitimate government.”
That is not what A.morphous wrote. He was asked, “What is the difference, do tell us, between ‘power’ and ‘authority’?” His response:
“Not much.”
True. But he first wrote:
Where he disagrees with Traditionalists in respect to the proper constitution of a legitimate government is in whether there is a difference between power and authority. He thinks not; his view of authority is utterly Nietzschean, as would have to be the case for any materialist such as he (seems to be). Certainly there is some authority in power; power does indeed have authority. But it does not have all authority; there is more to proper authority than mere power. If it were not so, then a tsunami would have greater authority than a legitimate government. That it does not shows that equating power and authority is a category error.
Oh, didn’t realize you are sucker enough to fall for the wingnut echo chamber. See here for something a bit closer to reality.
Sorry people are being mean to you because you have retrograde opinions, but as the post says, you can’t legislate niceness. The 1st amendment guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from the consequences of speech.
So a.morphous claims that conservatives have misinterpreted the now-infamous comment about parents reading to children. But the comment was in regard to a book, and to quote the book’s description at Amazon,
“… parents have no fundamental right to confer … advantage on their children.” That sounds exactly like what the authors were accused of.
A.morphous, the link you provided is busted. The one I provided – not to some wingnut echo chamber, but to a sympathetically edited interview with Swift himself – is not:
You write:
I’m staggered to hear such a stupid, sloppy argument as this from a smart fellow like you. No one here is bitching about the fact that we suffer personal consequences when we pose our arguments, sometimes at the cost of our friendly and familiar relationships; nor is anyone here objecting to the notion that people ought to be free to associate and transact business with anyone they choose. On the contrary! We defend the right of the baker and his customer to do business – or to refuse such business – of any sort with anyone for any reason, or no reason. If someone refuses to do business with me because of my views, or the color of my hair, or the region of my ancestry, or because he just doesn’t like the shoes I’m wearing, that’s his prerogative.
But that is not what we have been talking about. The courts are being employed by citizens to force other citizens to do business with them, and the state through the courts is imposing massive penalties on the defendants under the authority of its laws.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech from abridgement by *any law* of Congress. By extension it guarantees freedom of association. If the consequences of saying x or hanging out with y include penalties inflicted by an organ of the state, then speech is not free.
Think about it. What if the Westboro Baptist Church came to your catering service for help with a banquet, and you refused to do business with them because you didn’t like what they say and do. And then they sued you for discrimination, and the court awarded them $135,000 of your money under a law that forbad anyone from refusing to do business with Christians. Under your argument, the $135,000 penalty – plus the cost of defending yourself – are just the consequences you should be prepared to accept for your free speech. No problem! Suck it up!
“Freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences.”
This is the new “she had it coming” excuse to sexually harass a woman, applied to conservatives (*and cannibalized liberals from time to time) who dare adorn themselves in scantily clad arguments that don’t meet the modest fashions of liberal opinion.
*
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/01/396384141/jon-ronson-has-nothing-to-be-ashamed-of-but-what-about-the-rest-of-us
The link works for me.
Presumably you’ve read enough philosophy to understand that philosophers sometimes entertain hypotheticals without actually advocating them as policy.
The article you cite says:
You say
I haven’t said a word about this particular issue. But — in fact, that is not the law, so the baker does not have an arbitrary right to refuse business, and hasn’t since the civil rights acts were passed. Certainly there are arguments against this, but I’m not particularly interested in fighting that battle here. It’s been fought for well over a century in the courts and legislature. Your side lost, so it is in fact part of US law that businesses that are open to the public have restrictions on how they can discriminate.
If you don’t like this, it is your right to complain about it of course. But I wish you wouldn’t pretend it is something new and world-ending. We’ve managed to end racial apartheid in the US and somehow have survived.
The Civil Rights laws are clearly unconstitutional, despite what the Supreme Court said. And they are potentially totalitarian. But in any case, you were the one who brought up the Constitution, in the course of suggesting that we traditionalists don’t like it when people are mean to us on account of our “retrograde opinions.” I retorted that no, we don’t mind it when people are mean to us on account of our opinions, but rather when we are persecuted by the state for their sake; so much so that we think anyone ought to be within his rights to have nothing to do with us, in business or anything else, whether for our opinions or for any other reason, or for no reason.
Swift concludes that we really must allow parents to care for their children rather than others, but he does so in the context of the open question whether or not it might not be a good idea to stop them doing so. Just to broach the possibility is monstrous; like Peter Singer suggesting that it might be A-OK to kill inconvenient toddlers. Just to entertain this sort of notion is profoundly evil.
You don’t see the handwriting on the wall. We do. That’s all.
I don’t 100% agree with this. I think it is important to point out that there is no moral symmetry because we are right and they are wrong. I understand the obvious implications of what I have said, but there is just no way around this. The way around this was supposed to be liberalism, which as we have seen, doesn’t actually get around it at all.
Josh, what is it that you don’t quite agree with?
It’s amazing (and telling about a.morphous’s character) that a couple of perverts can waltz into a private business with the express intention to destroy its owners’ ability to make a living in that business or any other business by and with the aid of the state, and that the a.morphouses of the world endorse such a thing, declaring it to be the proper function of a “legitimate government.” And the more the merrier! Get thee behind me, Satan, indeed.
I reserve the right to refuse my services to freaks and perverts of every denomination. Including a.morphous and his ilk. Sue me!
“we think anyone ought to be within his rights to have nothing to do with us, in business or anything else, whether for our opinions or for any other reason, or for no reason.”
I was actually reading more into this than was said, but I thought it implied that the state ought to be neutral when it came to who was allowed to discriminate against whom. I actually think, at least in a theoretically sane state, that the state should take action to maintain a Christian society. A town should be able to ban homosexual dance clubs because they want to discourage anti-social sexual behavior, but they should not be able to ban Christian bible study classes because they are Christian. Perhaps, we don’t disagree, but I wanted to make it clear that, at least for myself, I don’t advocate a “neutral” state.
I think that I can speak for traditionalists and say that we don’t advocate a neutral state either.
Got it, Josh; agreed. The state needn’t be neutral. In fact, it is logically impossible for the state to be neutral.
The state may, indeed must make all sorts of discriminations among activities. To discriminate is just to discern moral categories, and all law is founded upon such discriminations. “Neutral state” then is an oxymoron.
The state may then outlaw many sorts of acts, such as homosexual acts, or acts of violence, or of fraud, of pollution, and the like. Within the constraints of such state discriminations, individuals may then be free to discern other, subsidiary moral categories, and guide their acts accordingly.
With respect to speech, for example, libel and slander and fraud are all illegal; so is yelling “fire” when there is no fire. These legal discriminations rule *out* certain sorts of acts. Likewise with respect to association, riots are illegal, whereas the law is indifferent to most other sorts of gatherings. What is not prohibited is permitted, and within the bounds of what is permitted, individuals may freely act under their own recognizance of the constraints of civil society.
What is happening with the liberal state is that it is trying to enforce moral neutrality. It is attempting to “rule in;” to *make* us behave in certain ways; or, as our oligarchs more often put it, to “reform society.” It is prohibiting more and more of the private discriminations of individuals.
The effort is rife with logical contradictions, so it cannot succeed. It is the attempt to cope with these logical contradictions that drives law, policy and regulation into ever more baroque hairsplitting and totalitarian control of behavior, and indeed thought. Even glances are now falling under the gimlet eye of our commissars, at least within the precincts where dwell the moral vanguard of society, and where the high priests and their acolytes work these things out: our college campuses.
Josh, in this we disagree. I do think the government should not be able to ban either homosexual dance clubs or Christian bible study classes. Of course, I also think no other private business should be forced to do business with either entity.
OK – full disclosure – I’m not in any way a Christian and I don’t have your religious objection to homosexuality. I do, however, respect that you DO have such. Be that as it may…
Where does “Christian” start and end and how far are you willing to let the government go to make that decision and draw that line?
Don’t get me wrong! That’s a hard and messy question that goes all the way back to the Founders. Indeed, most of the back-and-forth over the wording of the 2nd Amendment was to ensure that it couldn’t be used to keep certain sects of Christians from keeping arms and bearing them in defense of the nation. Yet, old as the question is, every one you Christians should address it again whenever any of you make statements like you made.
@Josh – Correct. We’re not making the Libertarian argument, we’re just pointing out that Liberalism doesn’t even live up to its own BS. It’s dishonest.
@jonolan –
The Reactionary State is not secular, so it has a power distribution between the sovereign ruler and the Church, who have their own appropriate civil responsibilities and duties to perform (the other key powers are the individuals, and fathers as heads of household, but they are a different subject). Christianity does not prescribe a specific civil code, like say Judaism or Islam. We are given pretty wide room for application as we see fit, and as the situation requires.
For instance, the Bible quite clearly tells us that children having profound disrespect for their parents is a moral evil. Should the state punish this? No. Why not? Because this moral law can be upheld by parents themselves. It doesn’t require a monarch or a priest getting involved, in fact to do so would get tedious very quickly and would represent a gross power play by the state.
I’m sure we would agree that the governing authorities do have a responsibility to punish crimes like theft or murder, which seems common sense. The Reactionary however recognizes that the principle of “if it doesn’t break my leg or pick my pocket” is pretty foolish. There are plenty of destructive activities we can engage in that do neither to anyone else, but should still be illegal. For instance, producing pornography. You’re not hurting anyone directly, but you are creating something that is essentially acid on the culture. And when you damage the culture, that DOES eventually filter down to damaging individual people.
We’ve kind of had this mindset surrounding sexual activity since the Enlightenment that it has no societal significance and therefore should be unrestricted, even to the point where some now advocate removing age of consent laws for minors. Sex is just another pastime, like playing table tennis. The Traditional view of sexual relations is different, because they are very much intrinsic to the survival of the state. They of course are the tool of producing future citizens. Imbalanced sexual economy, corrupt sexual economy, dysfunctional sexual economy? It won’t end well.
When one hears that, they often think of the government mechanizing the sexual process and making sure we reproduce using forced pregnancy to combat dangerously low birthrates. No such Orwellian thing is required. The old system, in place for thousands of years works fine! A large amount of taboos around non-reproductive sex, including but not limited to legal penalties (which are rarely actually used, and serve mostly as a deterrent and social narrative tool) are good for preserving healthy birth rates. It’s partly about morality, but also partly about ‘what works’. Funnily enough, the two overlap.
I guess the short answer to your question is that Faith in the Reactionary state is entwined into every aspect of the culture to varying degrees. It’s just part of life, like eating and drinking. The responsibility of religious authorities however, is limited to their proper sphere, and they are not to step outside of it. Nor is the sovereign ruler to step out of his. How encompassing this sphere is is obviously determined by technology available, moral state of the population, and indeed just the preference of the ruler. There’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach.
“We’ve managed to end racial apartheid in the US and somehow have survived.”
Sort of and sort of.
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
As far as I know there are no laws against saying x or hanging out with y; there are only laws that prohibit certain forms of discrimination by businesses open to the public. So, what in the world are you talking about? (I assume we are talking about the US here; not other countries).
In doing business we speak and associate with others. There’s no other way to get it done. Prohibiting discrimination on the part of businesses open to the public is prohibiting certain types of speech and association. Honestly, a.morphous, are you trolling me, or is it really true that I have to spell this out?
I think what is being pointed out here is the hypocrisy of the ideology the formless one adheres to. He might talk about people having individual liberty, but he really doesn’t believe in it. He can’t afford to, because then ‘nasty retrograde people’ would have the freedom to operate as they choose, and since their goal is to eliminate the very system he advocates for, they simply cannot be included under the umbrella of his ‘freedom’. By some means, they must be stopped.
This has always been the case, and it will always be the case. What we’re asking is why can’t the Liberal just be honest. State that you are of a dogmatic ideology with an entirely different value system, and because you have power, you will impose this dogma on everyone. This is what is happening anyway, so why not just cop to it? Because Liberals are cowards.
Reactionaries are candid. When we talk about the criminalization of activities in accordance with natural law and historical precedent (retrograde things I’m sure), we’re not trying to hide anything. The Reactionary State has a dogma, whether it be Catholic, Orthodox, or some other basis, and this is how societies have existed for thousands of years. What’s annoying is Liberals trying to put themselves OUTSIDE this box, and saying they aren’t imposing anything. You definitely are. Just admit that yours is a religion where the greatest heresies are racism, sexism, and homophobia, and you prosecute against them with an inquisitors zeal.
Once you’ve actually admitted that Liberalism is at core about inviolable ideological points of doctrine, rather than a call for ‘freedom for all’, then we can actually begin to discuss why that doctrine is profoundly evil, maladaptive, and disordered.
(As a side note: by your definition of freedom of speech, there is freedom of speech in every country in the world. There’s just no freedom from the consequence, whether it be losing your job, or being thrown into a North Korean prison. All that the legal system is is a system of consequences. We are technically free to do as we please, but be prepared for the consequences of what you do and say. As such, the idealized freedom of speech simply doesn’t exist. If there’s something I can say that will render me destitute, how is that ANY different from something I can say that will put me in prison? It’s fine to be practically against free speech, but don’t LIE about it and say that you’re for it when you really aren’t.)
Of course liberalism is an ideology. It just happens to be one that tries to minimize impositions of value, and one that maintains itself through democracy (so not “imposed”). Yes, sometimes this involves tradeoffs, and bakers may have to bake cakes for people they don’t approve of, or lunch-counters must serve all races, because that is deemed to be a lesser imposition than widespread discrimination.
So why don’t you admit that your beef is not that liberalism pretends not to be an ideology, but that it is winning over yours?
Freedom of speech, in the US, guarantees you against reprisals from the government (in theory at least). It doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be fired from your job. Just a few paragraphs back you were in a libertarian huff because of anti-discrimination laws; now you seem to be suggesting that private companies should be prohibited from firing people as they see fit. You guys don’t seem to have a very well thought-out belief system, which is disappointing.
And if you can’t distinguish in your thought between the US (whatever its flaws) and North Korea, you really are too far gone to be worth spending time on.
Oh, so democracy – that is to say mob rule – equals freedom, er the minimization of imposition. Or something like that. lol.
This guy’s an absolute riot! Evidently it’s escaped his attention that the “will of the people” through referendums and such, is very often, these days, overthrown by the government through judicial fiat. That’s democracy for ya; God bless America!
To borrow from a movie line: we’re not about to throw out thousands of years of civilizational history just because you and your kind find yourseves in the *unique* position of advocating a self-destructive totalitarian ideology that claims it isn’t.
So, here you admit that PRIVATE companies discriminating counts as far more than a mere ‘lesser imposition’, and so must be combated by a state that is anti-imposition.
Now you are stating that the government will not and should not defend you from the imposition of being fired for what you say by PRIVATE companies.
Now you come out with this inconsistent BS. If the actions of PRIVATE companies can count as great impositions, then Liberalism must stifle these impositions, as per its own standards which you lay out, which it does with discrimination. However, you become incoherent as you try to defend banning ‘discrimination’ because its such an imposition, but are totally fine with companies firing people because of what they say, because that’s… not an imposition??? Either private actions are impositions, or they aren’t. Make up your damn mind.
You’re clearly not following the discussion, as I had previously pointed out the Libertarian position is not what we support. What we are doing when we make this argument is to show you how your worldview is wholly inconsistent with its stated baseline principles. No, Liberalism does not seek to minimize imposition, it simply aims to change the type of impositions, from inherently good ones to inherently bad ones. Our belief system is pretty easy to understand if you actually bother to read the whole discussion.
Both Modernist countries, with only superficial differences in their innate character. The fact that you are blind to their common baseline assumptions doesn’t bother me.
Yes, we’ve stepped rightward out of the little box of ‘acceptable rightism’. I know Liberals don’t like this and largely have no tools with which to interact with it, so maybe you should be over at Breitbart arguing with some Republicans? You’re certainly contributing very little here. You don’t even read the full extent of a discussion.
Nice job trucking in this point which has no relevance to an intellectual discussion whatsoever. You might as well have said “your beef is that you need to get laid.” And please, be confident in your ideology and its eternal dominance. We encourage this.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Dear boy, I am not the one making libertarian arguments, you are. Therefore being inconsistent about application of libertarian principles is a problem for you, not for me. Try to keep track.
Well, presumably we are all human beings and have a common interest in human flourishing. And we have to live on the same planet. So it behooves everyone to understand their enemies.
As if stuck on repeat, your disingenuous nature and almost deliberate inability to grasp how ideas are deconstructed rears its ugly head.
Liberalism is an outgrowth of Libertarianism, so by using your own bedrock principles against you, it is shown that your Liberalism is an inconsistent mess with no workable foundation. You fail to engage with my critique of what you’re saying because you don’t have an answer beyond…
“Firing people for ‘retrograde’ beliefs is not an imposition, but discriminatory business practices somehow are an imposition.”
Again, you don’t actually deny what has been said, that both North Korea and the United States rest on the same Modern outlook and worldview simply manifested in a different way, instead opting to say that recognizing this incontrovertible fact someone renders one ‘broken’. It’s not surprising, since during your entire tenure here as a commenter, you have never succeeded in actually understanding Reactionary thought, or really even your own thought beyond what the situation requires. It’s really no wonder people are getting tired of engaging you.
Say what?
The intellectual history of those two terms is complicated. They both share a core value of individual freedom, but interpret that very differently. In the present, “libertarian” means someone who believes in that individual rights trump everything else and those rights should be expressed exclusively or mostly as property rights, with minimal government intervention. “Liberal” is someone who believes in maximizing overall individual freedom in a broader sense and is willing to use the government to intervene to help secure those freedoms. So a liberal is willing to interfere with the freedom of business owners to discriminate, and is willing to use redistributive taxation to ameliorate the unfreedom of, say, someone who is unemployed and needs health care, because if you are dead you don’t have much freedom.
Libertarianism appeals to the weak-minded because it is simple (and especially to the weak-minded who think they are smart). But modern society isn’t simple.
I would like to know what libertarianism has to do with reactionary thought, which I didn’t think put a very high value on freedom.
I act against my better judgment spending time on this, but I will.
Libertarianism cannot be seen as an offshoot or variety of Liberalism, which is what Communism essentially is. Libertarianism is rather to be seen as a kind of meta-ideology, not meant for real world application because it’s impractical (something you point out), but it is the root, the prototype for Liberalism at large, and as such inevitably leads to Liberalism. You might even call it Liberalism’s ‘left ideal’, that which it moves away from at the beginning.
As such, the key trope of Libertarianism, ‘freedom’, ‘individual liberty’, ‘autonomy’, call it what you will, is the vanguard principle of Liberalism, at least on the surface. The criticism, and let’s see if you get it this time, is that your ideology has inevitably mutated to such a degree that it has almost zero coherence with the Libertarian ideal of preserving freedom.
You can argue this is due to practicality, that you simply MUST have government intervention to stop the private citizen ‘imposing’ anything on another private citizen, but as we’ve demonstrated this is a weapon’s grade falsehood. If you followed through, you would support the notion that the government should stop private citizens from ‘imposing’ unemployment on somebody because of what they say.
Since there is a clear inconsistency of principle here, there is only one explanation. Any support for freedom on the part of Liberals is now purely ancillary to the cancerous growths of its other competing interests, e.g your fetishizing of sexual perverts, ethnic minorities, and of course the patriarchy-oppressed woman. If freedom conflicts with these interests, then they take precedent over it, as they are such precious snowflakes. You call this “individual freedom in a broader sense”. I call it hierarchy bashed with a hammer and turned upside down. I call it sick, depraved, and disordered.
And so, even while you try to make claims to a neutral ground of ‘freedom for all’ even those who disagree!, you are actually no less dogmatic than Reactionaries. It’s just that your dogmas are immoral, false, and entropically destructive.
Well we have the much in common at least.
That too! I disagree with most of what you wrote, but that is pretty accurate. I would like to overthrow traditional hierarchies, and this is a good encapsulation of what the left is about.
“I would like to overthrow traditional hierarchies, and this is a good encapsulation of what the left is about.”
We know. As such, you are an enemy. So why you think you’d have anything to say that we would need to hear is baffling.
Greetings, Orthosphere. I have dropped by to announce that after some deliberation and misfortune (e.g. Locked by police, stayed in hospital) that I have decided to become a Catholic Christian in Europe. Cheers, have a nice day and may both God and the blessed Virgin Mary mother of God be you.
Dear alcestiseshtemoa,
It sounds as if you would have quite a story to tell. Perhaps you can elaborate further.
Somebody inside the church called the cops because they thought that I was disturbing the church service with my talk of confession (I confessed my sin to the priest within the confession booth) and walking around the Lady chapel. After I was locked up and injected with medication, I kept praying to the blessed Virgin Mary mother of God for salvation and protection for myself as well as my family.
The police?! A hospital?!
See, maybe a.morphous really does just need a spanking.
Vale, Alcestis! Farther up and farther in! How may we help?
Greetings, Kristor. Prayer and comments from the Orthosphere is enough help as needed.
*”I would like to overthrow traditional heirarchies.”
I would like to bend you over my knee and strap your belligerent ass.
*Something about a ‘common interest in human flourishing.’
We have very little in common, and certainly not in your idea of “human flourishing.” See your quote above.
As Marc suggested above, why don’t you go argue with some Republicans/”conservatives.”
Thanks for sharing your fantasy, can our stop word be “eschaton”?
You guys are more interesting. Just as wrong, but on a deeper level.
We are just fixating on the local definition of truth that is most useful to us. Don’t judge me, man.
“You guys are more interesting.”
Hey!, thanks for the compliment. I’m sure we all appreciate that you’re able to make the distinction between Traditionalists and your allies within mainstream “conservatism.”
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