Of course words change their meaning with use, but in recent times I suspect the art of Communications has been able to pervert them for politically interested purposes.
Beautiful post. Thank you. I would like to see this as part of a course lecture at the secondary or post secondary level. Would it be inappropriate for middle school students? I think 8th graders could handle this.
I have had college freshmen who totally get this, and others who have no idea about thinking about rhetorical moves in what they read. I think it definitely can be taught to high school kids or 8th graders. I don't recall how old I was when I was first told "Ask yourself what the author wants to be true" but it was before college, and it really stuck with me.
Homophobia, with the AIDS and Bible justifications, is the starting example I might have picked, too, if I had wanted to be particularly controversial. Feeling discomfort at and the avoidance of homosexual persons or content is not all that inappropriate for the use of the term phobia. The repressed fear of one's own homosexual leanings is but one theory for its etiology albeit a poor one, IMO. I would favor evolutionary psychological explanations. As with many other types of non-normative behavior, we have learned to be more tolerant than our instincts suggest to us. That's civilization and its discontents. - My own favorite example is "islamophobia" and Hitchens' characterization of it: a word invented by fascists and used by cowards in order to manipulate morons.
What if, as in my examples, the discomfort is not irrational? Is avoiding someone carrying a disease a phobia? Avoiding a lion or a rattlesnake?
How does avoiding male homosexuals leads to reproductive success for men (or female for women)? The fact that a man is homosexual makes him less likely to seduce my mate, hence his presence is less a threat to my reproductive success than that of a male heterosexual.
One of the odd things about hostility to homosexuals by people of the same gender is that it is the opposite of the attitude implied by self interest. The more homosexual men there are the less the competition heterosexual men face for getting mates.
At least in the case of "homophobia" you appear to have started with a wrong derivation. The term was coined in a Psychology Today article in the 1970s, in which the authors theorized that people who dislike gays were motivated by the fear that if lots of gay people were around and were accepted, then they might be tempted to try it themselves and (horrors!) might like it. Thus being a "homophobe" at least suggested that you were a "latent" gay yourself, and this allegedly explained why people who weren't directly affected by gays felt so strongly about not wanting them around.
Compare to today's situation where public school teachers are actively persuading grade school kids to become transsexuals and it becomes obvious that fear of them is often justified. Thus the word, and similarly "transphobia," no longer make sense except as propaganda by those who want to enable this and other kinds of abuse.
I wasn't complaining about "homophobic" as a label for some people with negative views of homosexuality but about applying it to everyone with such views, so I'm not sure in what sense I started with a wrong derivation.
Straight men do not dislike homosexual men the way they dislike rattlesnakes. "Carrying a disease" is closer to what we're trying to explain but it's not AIDS. It's somewhat closer to the discomfort felt in the presence of deviance in general, such as effeminate demeanor. I don't think competition for females is relevant here.
Don't put much stock in that paper or even Eugine's comment. Phalometric's have long been discredited by everyone except the SOTP complex which has an incentive to keep the junk science. The study also conflates minors with prepubescents, sex offenders with people who didn't commit a sexual offense, didn't look at the general population, ignored women offenders, etc. it's about as junk a study as you can get, something extremely ripe in the SOTP field, as with any other field where it's entire livelihood is dependent on sensationalizing for Federal grants.
I say Eugene's comment because by definition pedophiles aren't heterosexual nor homosexual hence the pedo prefix in the same way zoophiles aren't homosexual nor heterosexual.
Does "Rootless Cosmopolitan" still mean Jew? I understand it mostly in the context of current political arguments about "nationalism vs globalism", where one side is characterized as rooted in a particular locale and its people's cultural traditions, and the other is characterized as being unbound by loyalty to home or nation. I believe I have even used the phrase myself intending this meaning.
Obviously, Jews being a diaspora people, they will be more represented in the latter group than the former. And also quite clearly the aforementioned "nationalists" are often anti-semitic, so I suppose it stands to reason that may use "rootless cosmopolitan" as a dog whistle. I think the disagreement these days is much larger and not necessarily or primarily about anti-semitism, but this wouldn't be the first situation in which I was unusually slow to recognize ethnic prejudice.
Either way, I thought the post was a good summary of the situation it describes.
I believe the term originated in the Soviet Union, applied to Jewish intellectuals on the theory that they were unbound by loyalty to Russia or Russian culture.
My impression is that nowadays, the big nationalist parties in the West (say SD in Sweden or FN in France) tend to be the most philosemitic of the mainstream parties, whereas the globalist parties on the left tend to be the most antisemitic. I think this has to do with nationalists seeing their own country and Israel as having similar problems in regards to Arabs/Muslims and thus coming to sympathize with Jews.
This seems very true with nationalist Orban & Hungary, where many Jews are living without fear from Muslim violence. Rod Dreher, now based in Budapest, often talks about it a bit.
I don't think it would have been entirely dishonest to refer to these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwi_Migdal as White Slavers, and they were apparently around long after the Barbary Pirates.
Some other dishonest words that come to mind: Islamophobic, transphobic, misogynistic. These terms are often used to implicitly attribute a particular motivation to someone (supposedly explaining that person's actions) although the term poses merely as a label for something. Would you count "market failure" as a weakly dishonest word or simply misleading one? I know you wrote about it.
Some time ago I analyzed how certain words provide us with "strategic ambiguity" that enable us to simultaneously convey to others what we selfishly want while leaving the impression that our wants are much more sublime than they really are: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/it-sounds-better
The only thing wrong with "market failure" is the implicationn that it is about markets; it is a problem that exists in a wide variety of contexts of which that is only one. Presumably whoever invented the term was thinking of examples that occur on markets.
In my view, the right way to think about it is as situations where individually rational behavior does not produce group rational behavior. For a more detailed explanation, see:
And then there's Islamophobia which can mean many different things to different people. At one end it is the rational desire to avoid individuals who may spontaneously detonate while searching for the Aloha Snackbar on the other it's an unrealistic fear of anyone slightly tanned who follows a particular religion
Also, the vast majority of Republicans are democrats, and the vast majority of Democrats are republicans. Funny how political parties try to monopolise certain generally accepted views by way of their names.
The same thing happens in reverse. The leftist terrorist group Antifa resembles nothing so much as the Nazi SA "brownshirts," both in policy positions and tactics, but took for themselves the label "antifascist" to preempt the right's ability to call them out on that fact. Of course this is helped by the biased "mainstream" media cooperating with the left's word usage.
Don’t forget decades of Soviet propaganda describing the Nazis as being on the right.
Benito Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism, began as a socialist. He saw the all-powerful state as an alternate solution to the class struggle; a way to make the bourgeois and proletariat work together.
The Weimar communists had their own street fighters. According to Hoffer, the street fighter types mostly wanted to be violent and defected back and forth between the communists and the fascists, to both sides' ideologues' frustration.
The Framers famously called our federal government “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The Evil party started calling it a democracy, as semantic judo, and the Stupid party fell for it.
I have observed that when a decision has to be made - fund a company / ship a project or shut it down, the disappointed side will frequently spend their time and invective accusing the decision maker of being immoral, evil, ...; rather than addressing the factors that drove the decision. In my career I have been called a Prussian, Lord Vader, Dr. Strangelove, and Lord High Executioner, as well as many other things rather more profane. It goes with the territory. In my analysis concerning the company where I was criticized as Lord High Executioner I wrote a long report that basically said that for the company's product to succeed in the targeted market they had to do all of 14 things right. They got 13 of them on the button. The 14th disqualified them from the target market. I suggested that they look at an alternative, but probably smaller market, where the 14th item issue would be less of an issue.
It is important to very clear about the success and failure criteria. It cannot be a personal issue at all.
Dissapointed parties are all to likely to ignore the criteria and resort to moral / justice calls and personal attacks.
I agree with much of this, but I don't think I agree about "libertarian."
There are a lot of things that I value, and that I think are likely products of a libertarian society: a great increase in global wealth, the continuing advance of scientific knowledge, a lively and popularly appreciated artistic culture. And those are things that a lot of people who aren't libertarians may also want. But precisely because of that, those aren't specifically libertarian goals or values.
What is distinctively libertarian is the MEANS by which we want to pursue those goals, or whatever goals we want to pursue. Libertarians value voluntary cooperation, through the market and through other forms of free association; and as the other side of this, libertarians want to avoid things that go against voluntary cooperation, such as force, threats, and fraud. The libertarian goal is to expand the extent of voluntary cooperation; the libertarian constraint is to avoid or prevent or counteract the use of force and fraud, whether by the state, by individuals, or by voluntary associations. And the constraint may be more fundamental.
In my exchanges every land
Shall walk, and mine in every land
Mutual shall build Jerusalem,
Both heart in hear and hand in hand
— William Blake, Jerusalem (not the hymn known by that title, which is from his epic poem Milton, but a passage from the epic poem by the title Jerusalem)
I am not talking about the term "libertarian" but "statist" and "collectivist." That someone is in favor of the draft is evidence that he is, in that respect, less libertarian than someone against it. But there is no good reason to conclude that he is a statist or a collectivist since his position can be explained without that.
Well, the term I would use for the contrary of "libertarian" is neither of those, but "authoritarian." "Collectivist" is opposed to "individualist," which has a lot of overlap with "libertarian" but isn't synonymous with it; "statist" is more complex, as there may be more than one contrastive position.
I say that to lead up to saying that the libertarian position is one of opposition to conscription, so if someone favors conscription they are an authoritarian. Though of course they may be libertarian on other issues. Not many people are consistently libertarian or consistently authoritarian across the board.
I think "not a libertarian" is more accurate than "authoritarian." The latter implies that the reason the person is in favor of the draft is that he likes having authorities compel people to do things. That doesn't fit someone who is in favor of the draft because he believes that without it we will be conquered, resulting in a much more authoritarian society than the present one with a draft.
I don't see that it matters what someone's motives for favoring a policy are. One person may favor an authoritarian policy as intrinsically desirable; another as instrumental to some more basic end. But the policy is still authoritarian.
If we are going to adopt the word "non-libertarian," that raises the question of whether there is a set of positions that are "non-authoritarian" but not "libertarian." Are there two different distinctions here or only one?
I think my own view would be that either you have a principle of safeguarding individual freedom of choice, or you don't. If you don't, you probably don't violate freedom of choice all the time; as C. S. Lewis said, "The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated." But you still are unfree: You have no right that can be appealed to. This is why I don't consider Germany, for example, to have freedom of speech: The Basic Law provides freedom of speech and the press, but then says, "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour." The first of those qualifications says basically that any time the legislature sees fit to pass a law restricting freedom of speech, you have no right to appeal to against that restriction.
A slave with a tolerant and kindly master is still a slave.
"I don't see that it matters what someone's motives for favoring a policy are."
It matters if you are giving him a label that implies a particular motive and it isn't true. Someone who favors a draft because he thinks it necessary to defend the country from a foreign enemy is not demonstrating that he values the collective over the individual or that he worships the state, so is not demonstrating that he is either a collectivist or a statist.
Thinking about this, I want to go back to the point I originally made: That the proper contrary to "libertarian" is "authoritarian." Collectivism or statism is often a motive for being authoritarian, but they're neither one the same issue.
I can definitely vouch that when I was more, let's say Hoppe'd up, I didn't really see a difference between things once they got far enough from the minarchist corner. The sort of thing where if things share certain commonalities, they become the same in your mind even if there's important differences, too.
Of course, if the critical thing is ability to vote for minarchy in a Nordic country, your options are probably to move out or wait for the grass to start growing over your head.
You can probably vote for it — they are multi-party systems, and if necessary you can start your own party. But you won't get it any decade soon.
If the critical thing is your ability to persuade people, it helps to first understand them, which the sort of terminology I am criticizing makes more difficult.
I slightly oppose gay marriage, strongly oppose the SCOTUS opinion, strongly oppose the state allowing gays to adopt kids. Yet I have gay friends who don’t call me homophobic, tho many others would call me that, with the purpose of not addressing the arguments. Marriage is for raising kids, not so much about who you’re having sex with.
On kids, what is optimal? It’s a known unknown about each child’s sexual attraction, as well as being unknown how much influence are genes, pre-natal environment, infant & post birth care, childhood & puberty & college.
What are the metrics and the way to evaluate trade-offs? Adults confused, unhappy, committing suicide, sex crimes (against women, kids). Maybe some norm leads to more happiness and more suicides, like today’s gay tolerance. Maybe tolerance as a mild mental illness norm leads to less happiness and less suicides, perhaps like the 90s. Is that a better situation? Maybe all of the negatives are caused by something else, like smartphone social media addiction, so suicide counts weren’t influenced by norm changes about homosexuality.
I know we don’t know, but I’m really annoyed we can’t even talk in public about what are the results of norm changes because of more gay tolerance, since homophobia gets used to attack those who bring up possible negatives about homosexuals.
X-phobic is an attempt to censor arguments about X, which is unlikely to lead to truth and very likely to lead to more resentment by those who are shut up by the labeling.
There is a differnce between tolerating - accepting - and supporting that seems to me to be lost in modern progressive culture. It seems to me that I can ask someone who does not believe in an activity to tolerate it in others, but I do not have grounds to ask them to support an activity they do not believe in. I do not approve of either alcohol or MJ. I accept alcohol drinking as long as the drinker does not drink too much, and I tolerate MJ - as long as it is not in my face. I find tobacco smoke to be more tolerable than MJ smoke, and that is saying a great deal for me. Similarily, I do not approve of either swinging or polyamory - on public health grounds to begin with and secondarily to my observations of poly behavior and how it turned out in the 1970's. But I tolerate swinging and accept poly. It is improper to ask me to support them. It is incorrect to declare that I am ignorant, close minded, or a prude. People will make their choices and have to accept the consequences, and some of the consequences are going to harm innocent parties. I would use the derogatory term homophobe only for someone who refused to tolerate it among others. We each have our value sets, it is when we try to force them upon others that we start infringing - and I include in infringing attempts to redefine language to force selected behavior upon individuals.
I suspect a lot of current words appending -phobia are less indicative of a fear and more of an unwillingness to have something shoved in your face.
For instance, I don't have veganphobia, but I really don't want to have the "benefits" of veganism shoved in my face. My very best friend in HS was gay when that was really, really bad. Our relationship was at least partly based on the fact that neither of us wanted to hear about anyone else's sex life.
I'm like the little old lady who was stopped by a cop, and he saw her concealed carry permit with her license. Upon asking she told him she had 4 different handguns within her reach, in different calibers. He asked what she was afraid of. She looked at him, smiled sweetly, and said, "Not a damn thing."
I'm not afraid of any of those -phobic things, I just don't want to be lectured about them, ever.
I get a lot out of reading your stuff, even when I disagree with it.
I think the argument about homophobia and racism misses something. These are not just individual opinions but also social norms. They are like a constant headwind. That wind can be slight and not much felt, buit it makes some activities go quicker and some go slower. A person can think that they are being completely rational and ignoring the racism or the homophobia. But if you are ignoring it, it is making you lean, even if you do not acknowledge the fact or even see it. If everyone around you is leaning the same way, do they seem to be leaning?
Yes, someone can claim that they oppose homosexuality on the basis you explained. But it will be easy for them to see the occurrence of a disease. It goes in the direction of the wind. Do they see the psychological damage done to people by forcing them to conform to heteronormativity? We can believe ourselves to be without prejudice, but we live in a culture and we are all imbued with its norms. And that culture is, I would argue, racist and homophobic.
One can scientifically investigate something. One can avoid racist or homophobic norms while doing so. But the decisions about what is worth investigating, the choices about how research results get presented, and the judgements about the significance of the research are all doing in a social context. Doing research and ignoring these social factors is disingenuous and I will criticize the research on this basis. I will do this despite the catcalls and heckling I will get, while the researcher gets a quiet hum of approval. It needs to be done.
I would say that our current culture is less racist and less sexist than any previous culture I can think of and less homophobic than most. Do you disagree? Examples of past cultures that it is worse than ours in those respects?
I think that in the present academic world you have it backwards, the researcher who concludes that there are significant differences in the distribution of abilities by race or gender is not the one who gets general approval.
If policies are based on a factual claim, are you opposed to people doing research that shows the claim to be false? That is how I interpret the "worth investigating" part of your comment. Am I mistaken?
Up to about 2008 I would have agreed with that ("our culture is less racist.." ). Since then the left has changed scripts and asserts that whenever white people, men, or heterosexuals are more successful than others it is the result of deliberate and unfair discrimination. They have coined new meanings of "privilege" and "racism" to embody those lies (also called "CRT"), and have been teaching them to public school kids since the Obama administration, deliberately to worsen race relations in the hope of provoking a race war which the left expects to win.
I hope they won't get their war, but if they do I want to help the right win it.
I agree that our culture (in as much as it can be described as one thing) is less racist and homophobic than most, and less than it has been. I cannot speak to the academic world, other than to say that these issues are being pushed harder there than in most places. When everybody bends from the wind, the one standing straight looks odd and then one bending the other direction looks really far out. And whatever is going on in the culture comes out in a more extreme way around academia.
And I would never oppose honest research. I might argue against the need to prioritize some research and I might suggest that conclusions of research needs to be honestly contextualized.
For example, some honest research might suggest that education dollars spent would be more efficient if spent differently. But efficiency, per se, is not the goal of our public education. So, if some research in education is not speaking to its goal, how should it be prioritized?
I realize that this statement about the goals of education is not a scientific statement, but a cultural norm. But culture judges science on its own terms, not on science's terms.
Spot on, as always!
Of course words change their meaning with use, but in recent times I suspect the art of Communications has been able to pervert them for politically interested purposes.
Beautiful post. Thank you. I would like to see this as part of a course lecture at the secondary or post secondary level. Would it be inappropriate for middle school students? I think 8th graders could handle this.
I don't see why not.
I have had college freshmen who totally get this, and others who have no idea about thinking about rhetorical moves in what they read. I think it definitely can be taught to high school kids or 8th graders. I don't recall how old I was when I was first told "Ask yourself what the author wants to be true" but it was before college, and it really stuck with me.
Today's most "dishonest words" are often examples of "Wokespeak", which "as any fule kno" makes them inverted fascism plus hypocrisy: https://jclester.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-inverted-fascism-plus
Homophobia, with the AIDS and Bible justifications, is the starting example I might have picked, too, if I had wanted to be particularly controversial. Feeling discomfort at and the avoidance of homosexual persons or content is not all that inappropriate for the use of the term phobia. The repressed fear of one's own homosexual leanings is but one theory for its etiology albeit a poor one, IMO. I would favor evolutionary psychological explanations. As with many other types of non-normative behavior, we have learned to be more tolerant than our instincts suggest to us. That's civilization and its discontents. - My own favorite example is "islamophobia" and Hitchens' characterization of it: a word invented by fascists and used by cowards in order to manipulate morons.
What if, as in my examples, the discomfort is not irrational? Is avoiding someone carrying a disease a phobia? Avoiding a lion or a rattlesnake?
How does avoiding male homosexuals leads to reproductive success for men (or female for women)? The fact that a man is homosexual makes him less likely to seduce my mate, hence his presence is less a threat to my reproductive success than that of a male heterosexual.
One of the odd things about hostility to homosexuals by people of the same gender is that it is the opposite of the attitude implied by self interest. The more homosexual men there are the less the competition heterosexual men face for getting mates.
At least in the case of "homophobia" you appear to have started with a wrong derivation. The term was coined in a Psychology Today article in the 1970s, in which the authors theorized that people who dislike gays were motivated by the fear that if lots of gay people were around and were accepted, then they might be tempted to try it themselves and (horrors!) might like it. Thus being a "homophobe" at least suggested that you were a "latent" gay yourself, and this allegedly explained why people who weren't directly affected by gays felt so strongly about not wanting them around.
Compare to today's situation where public school teachers are actively persuading grade school kids to become transsexuals and it becomes obvious that fear of them is often justified. Thus the word, and similarly "transphobia," no longer make sense except as propaganda by those who want to enable this and other kinds of abuse.
I wasn't complaining about "homophobic" as a label for some people with negative views of homosexuality but about applying it to everyone with such views, so I'm not sure in what sense I started with a wrong derivation.
Straight men do not dislike homosexual men the way they dislike rattlesnakes. "Carrying a disease" is closer to what we're trying to explain but it's not AIDS. It's somewhat closer to the discomfort felt in the presence of deviance in general, such as effeminate demeanor. I don't think competition for females is relevant here.
The fact that gay men are ten times more likely to be pedophiles is also relevant.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1556756/
This suggests 2:1 if I read it correctly. Do you have a citation?
Don't put much stock in that paper or even Eugine's comment. Phalometric's have long been discredited by everyone except the SOTP complex which has an incentive to keep the junk science. The study also conflates minors with prepubescents, sex offenders with people who didn't commit a sexual offense, didn't look at the general population, ignored women offenders, etc. it's about as junk a study as you can get, something extremely ripe in the SOTP field, as with any other field where it's entire livelihood is dependent on sensationalizing for Federal grants.
I say Eugene's comment because by definition pedophiles aren't heterosexual nor homosexual hence the pedo prefix in the same way zoophiles aren't homosexual nor heterosexual.
Does "Rootless Cosmopolitan" still mean Jew? I understand it mostly in the context of current political arguments about "nationalism vs globalism", where one side is characterized as rooted in a particular locale and its people's cultural traditions, and the other is characterized as being unbound by loyalty to home or nation. I believe I have even used the phrase myself intending this meaning.
Obviously, Jews being a diaspora people, they will be more represented in the latter group than the former. And also quite clearly the aforementioned "nationalists" are often anti-semitic, so I suppose it stands to reason that may use "rootless cosmopolitan" as a dog whistle. I think the disagreement these days is much larger and not necessarily or primarily about anti-semitism, but this wouldn't be the first situation in which I was unusually slow to recognize ethnic prejudice.
Either way, I thought the post was a good summary of the situation it describes.
I believe the term originated in the Soviet Union, applied to Jewish intellectuals on the theory that they were unbound by loyalty to Russia or Russian culture.
My impression is that nowadays, the big nationalist parties in the West (say SD in Sweden or FN in France) tend to be the most philosemitic of the mainstream parties, whereas the globalist parties on the left tend to be the most antisemitic. I think this has to do with nationalists seeing their own country and Israel as having similar problems in regards to Arabs/Muslims and thus coming to sympathize with Jews.
This seems very true with nationalist Orban & Hungary, where many Jews are living without fear from Muslim violence. Rod Dreher, now based in Budapest, often talks about it a bit.
I don't think it would have been entirely dishonest to refer to these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwi_Migdal as White Slavers, and they were apparently around long after the Barbary Pirates.
Interesting.
Some other dishonest words that come to mind: Islamophobic, transphobic, misogynistic. These terms are often used to implicitly attribute a particular motivation to someone (supposedly explaining that person's actions) although the term poses merely as a label for something. Would you count "market failure" as a weakly dishonest word or simply misleading one? I know you wrote about it.
Some time ago I analyzed how certain words provide us with "strategic ambiguity" that enable us to simultaneously convey to others what we selfishly want while leaving the impression that our wants are much more sublime than they really are: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/it-sounds-better
The only thing wrong with "market failure" is the implicationn that it is about markets; it is a problem that exists in a wide variety of contexts of which that is only one. Presumably whoever invented the term was thinking of examples that occur on markets.
In my view, the right way to think about it is as situations where individually rational behavior does not produce group rational behavior. For a more detailed explanation, see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Market%20Failure.htm
or, for a talk on the subject at the Oxford Union:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg
One good thing about "dishonest words" is that they should really mess up AI, which seems to need more clear definitions.
And then there's Islamophobia which can mean many different things to different people. At one end it is the rational desire to avoid individuals who may spontaneously detonate while searching for the Aloha Snackbar on the other it's an unrealistic fear of anyone slightly tanned who follows a particular religion
Also, the vast majority of Republicans are democrats, and the vast majority of Democrats are republicans. Funny how political parties try to monopolise certain generally accepted views by way of their names.
The same thing happens in reverse. The leftist terrorist group Antifa resembles nothing so much as the Nazi SA "brownshirts," both in policy positions and tactics, but took for themselves the label "antifascist" to preempt the right's ability to call them out on that fact. Of course this is helped by the biased "mainstream" media cooperating with the left's word usage.
Don’t forget decades of Soviet propaganda describing the Nazis as being on the right.
Benito Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism, began as a socialist. He saw the all-powerful state as an alternate solution to the class struggle; a way to make the bourgeois and proletariat work together.
The Weimar communists had their own street fighters. According to Hoffer, the street fighter types mostly wanted to be violent and defected back and forth between the communists and the fascists, to both sides' ideologues' frustration.
The Framers famously called our federal government “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The Evil party started calling it a democracy, as semantic judo, and the Stupid party fell for it.
I have observed that when a decision has to be made - fund a company / ship a project or shut it down, the disappointed side will frequently spend their time and invective accusing the decision maker of being immoral, evil, ...; rather than addressing the factors that drove the decision. In my career I have been called a Prussian, Lord Vader, Dr. Strangelove, and Lord High Executioner, as well as many other things rather more profane. It goes with the territory. In my analysis concerning the company where I was criticized as Lord High Executioner I wrote a long report that basically said that for the company's product to succeed in the targeted market they had to do all of 14 things right. They got 13 of them on the button. The 14th disqualified them from the target market. I suggested that they look at an alternative, but probably smaller market, where the 14th item issue would be less of an issue.
It is important to very clear about the success and failure criteria. It cannot be a personal issue at all.
Dissapointed parties are all to likely to ignore the criteria and resort to moral / justice calls and personal attacks.
I agree with much of this, but I don't think I agree about "libertarian."
There are a lot of things that I value, and that I think are likely products of a libertarian society: a great increase in global wealth, the continuing advance of scientific knowledge, a lively and popularly appreciated artistic culture. And those are things that a lot of people who aren't libertarians may also want. But precisely because of that, those aren't specifically libertarian goals or values.
What is distinctively libertarian is the MEANS by which we want to pursue those goals, or whatever goals we want to pursue. Libertarians value voluntary cooperation, through the market and through other forms of free association; and as the other side of this, libertarians want to avoid things that go against voluntary cooperation, such as force, threats, and fraud. The libertarian goal is to expand the extent of voluntary cooperation; the libertarian constraint is to avoid or prevent or counteract the use of force and fraud, whether by the state, by individuals, or by voluntary associations. And the constraint may be more fundamental.
In my exchanges every land
Shall walk, and mine in every land
Mutual shall build Jerusalem,
Both heart in hear and hand in hand
— William Blake, Jerusalem (not the hymn known by that title, which is from his epic poem Milton, but a passage from the epic poem by the title Jerusalem)
I am not talking about the term "libertarian" but "statist" and "collectivist." That someone is in favor of the draft is evidence that he is, in that respect, less libertarian than someone against it. But there is no good reason to conclude that he is a statist or a collectivist since his position can be explained without that.
Well, the term I would use for the contrary of "libertarian" is neither of those, but "authoritarian." "Collectivist" is opposed to "individualist," which has a lot of overlap with "libertarian" but isn't synonymous with it; "statist" is more complex, as there may be more than one contrastive position.
I say that to lead up to saying that the libertarian position is one of opposition to conscription, so if someone favors conscription they are an authoritarian. Though of course they may be libertarian on other issues. Not many people are consistently libertarian or consistently authoritarian across the board.
I think "not a libertarian" is more accurate than "authoritarian." The latter implies that the reason the person is in favor of the draft is that he likes having authorities compel people to do things. That doesn't fit someone who is in favor of the draft because he believes that without it we will be conquered, resulting in a much more authoritarian society than the present one with a draft.
I don't see that it matters what someone's motives for favoring a policy are. One person may favor an authoritarian policy as intrinsically desirable; another as instrumental to some more basic end. But the policy is still authoritarian.
If we are going to adopt the word "non-libertarian," that raises the question of whether there is a set of positions that are "non-authoritarian" but not "libertarian." Are there two different distinctions here or only one?
I think my own view would be that either you have a principle of safeguarding individual freedom of choice, or you don't. If you don't, you probably don't violate freedom of choice all the time; as C. S. Lewis said, "The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated." But you still are unfree: You have no right that can be appealed to. This is why I don't consider Germany, for example, to have freedom of speech: The Basic Law provides freedom of speech and the press, but then says, "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour." The first of those qualifications says basically that any time the legislature sees fit to pass a law restricting freedom of speech, you have no right to appeal to against that restriction.
A slave with a tolerant and kindly master is still a slave.
"I don't see that it matters what someone's motives for favoring a policy are."
It matters if you are giving him a label that implies a particular motive and it isn't true. Someone who favors a draft because he thinks it necessary to defend the country from a foreign enemy is not demonstrating that he values the collective over the individual or that he worships the state, so is not demonstrating that he is either a collectivist or a statist.
That's defining "authoritarian" as "someone who sometimes believes in violating rights," which I don't think is the usual meaning of the word.
Thinking about this, I want to go back to the point I originally made: That the proper contrary to "libertarian" is "authoritarian." Collectivism or statism is often a motive for being authoritarian, but they're neither one the same issue.
Except to the extent he believes defense must be collective to be effective.
Convoluted, but how about "Anti-voluntarian"?
I can definitely vouch that when I was more, let's say Hoppe'd up, I didn't really see a difference between things once they got far enough from the minarchist corner. The sort of thing where if things share certain commonalities, they become the same in your mind even if there's important differences, too.
Of course, if the critical thing is ability to vote for minarchy in a Nordic country, your options are probably to move out or wait for the grass to start growing over your head.
You can probably vote for it — they are multi-party systems, and if necessary you can start your own party. But you won't get it any decade soon.
If the critical thing is your ability to persuade people, it helps to first understand them, which the sort of terminology I am criticizing makes more difficult.
I slightly oppose gay marriage, strongly oppose the SCOTUS opinion, strongly oppose the state allowing gays to adopt kids. Yet I have gay friends who don’t call me homophobic, tho many others would call me that, with the purpose of not addressing the arguments. Marriage is for raising kids, not so much about who you’re having sex with.
On kids, what is optimal? It’s a known unknown about each child’s sexual attraction, as well as being unknown how much influence are genes, pre-natal environment, infant & post birth care, childhood & puberty & college.
What are the metrics and the way to evaluate trade-offs? Adults confused, unhappy, committing suicide, sex crimes (against women, kids). Maybe some norm leads to more happiness and more suicides, like today’s gay tolerance. Maybe tolerance as a mild mental illness norm leads to less happiness and less suicides, perhaps like the 90s. Is that a better situation? Maybe all of the negatives are caused by something else, like smartphone social media addiction, so suicide counts weren’t influenced by norm changes about homosexuality.
I know we don’t know, but I’m really annoyed we can’t even talk in public about what are the results of norm changes because of more gay tolerance, since homophobia gets used to attack those who bring up possible negatives about homosexuals.
X-phobic is an attempt to censor arguments about X, which is unlikely to lead to truth and very likely to lead to more resentment by those who are shut up by the labeling.
formatting seems a bit fucked up at the top of the post?
Thanks. Fixed. Somehow the note at the bottom of the post also got put at the top.
There is a differnce between tolerating - accepting - and supporting that seems to me to be lost in modern progressive culture. It seems to me that I can ask someone who does not believe in an activity to tolerate it in others, but I do not have grounds to ask them to support an activity they do not believe in. I do not approve of either alcohol or MJ. I accept alcohol drinking as long as the drinker does not drink too much, and I tolerate MJ - as long as it is not in my face. I find tobacco smoke to be more tolerable than MJ smoke, and that is saying a great deal for me. Similarily, I do not approve of either swinging or polyamory - on public health grounds to begin with and secondarily to my observations of poly behavior and how it turned out in the 1970's. But I tolerate swinging and accept poly. It is improper to ask me to support them. It is incorrect to declare that I am ignorant, close minded, or a prude. People will make their choices and have to accept the consequences, and some of the consequences are going to harm innocent parties. I would use the derogatory term homophobe only for someone who refused to tolerate it among others. We each have our value sets, it is when we try to force them upon others that we start infringing - and I include in infringing attempts to redefine language to force selected behavior upon individuals.
I suspect a lot of current words appending -phobia are less indicative of a fear and more of an unwillingness to have something shoved in your face.
For instance, I don't have veganphobia, but I really don't want to have the "benefits" of veganism shoved in my face. My very best friend in HS was gay when that was really, really bad. Our relationship was at least partly based on the fact that neither of us wanted to hear about anyone else's sex life.
I'm like the little old lady who was stopped by a cop, and he saw her concealed carry permit with her license. Upon asking she told him she had 4 different handguns within her reach, in different calibers. He asked what she was afraid of. She looked at him, smiled sweetly, and said, "Not a damn thing."
I'm not afraid of any of those -phobic things, I just don't want to be lectured about them, ever.
I get a lot out of reading your stuff, even when I disagree with it.
I think the argument about homophobia and racism misses something. These are not just individual opinions but also social norms. They are like a constant headwind. That wind can be slight and not much felt, buit it makes some activities go quicker and some go slower. A person can think that they are being completely rational and ignoring the racism or the homophobia. But if you are ignoring it, it is making you lean, even if you do not acknowledge the fact or even see it. If everyone around you is leaning the same way, do they seem to be leaning?
Yes, someone can claim that they oppose homosexuality on the basis you explained. But it will be easy for them to see the occurrence of a disease. It goes in the direction of the wind. Do they see the psychological damage done to people by forcing them to conform to heteronormativity? We can believe ourselves to be without prejudice, but we live in a culture and we are all imbued with its norms. And that culture is, I would argue, racist and homophobic.
One can scientifically investigate something. One can avoid racist or homophobic norms while doing so. But the decisions about what is worth investigating, the choices about how research results get presented, and the judgements about the significance of the research are all doing in a social context. Doing research and ignoring these social factors is disingenuous and I will criticize the research on this basis. I will do this despite the catcalls and heckling I will get, while the researcher gets a quiet hum of approval. It needs to be done.
I would say that our current culture is less racist and less sexist than any previous culture I can think of and less homophobic than most. Do you disagree? Examples of past cultures that it is worse than ours in those respects?
I think that in the present academic world you have it backwards, the researcher who concludes that there are significant differences in the distribution of abilities by race or gender is not the one who gets general approval.
If policies are based on a factual claim, are you opposed to people doing research that shows the claim to be false? That is how I interpret the "worth investigating" part of your comment. Am I mistaken?
Up to about 2008 I would have agreed with that ("our culture is less racist.." ). Since then the left has changed scripts and asserts that whenever white people, men, or heterosexuals are more successful than others it is the result of deliberate and unfair discrimination. They have coined new meanings of "privilege" and "racism" to embody those lies (also called "CRT"), and have been teaching them to public school kids since the Obama administration, deliberately to worsen race relations in the hope of provoking a race war which the left expects to win.
I hope they won't get their war, but if they do I want to help the right win it.
I agree that our culture (in as much as it can be described as one thing) is less racist and homophobic than most, and less than it has been. I cannot speak to the academic world, other than to say that these issues are being pushed harder there than in most places. When everybody bends from the wind, the one standing straight looks odd and then one bending the other direction looks really far out. And whatever is going on in the culture comes out in a more extreme way around academia.
And I would never oppose honest research. I might argue against the need to prioritize some research and I might suggest that conclusions of research needs to be honestly contextualized.
For example, some honest research might suggest that education dollars spent would be more efficient if spent differently. But efficiency, per se, is not the goal of our public education. So, if some research in education is not speaking to its goal, how should it be prioritized?
I realize that this statement about the goals of education is not a scientific statement, but a cultural norm. But culture judges science on its own terms, not on science's terms.