Rob Henderson on manipulative moralizing; Anton Howes and Matt Brown on steam engine evolution; Scott Alexander's requiem for neoreaction; Rod Dreher on Harvard's soft totalitarianism
What, and just going to hell by sticking with the system we have is a serious plan? A plan for what, disaster*?
I can say, "We need to get this bus off the railroad tracks," and someone could retort, "Okay Einstein, what's your plan for freeing that wheel twisted around the rail?" And, sure, they have a point. But also, I have a point.
The problem is that what the analysis reveals is that nothing short of what would qualify as "regime change" is the equivalent of "get the bus off the tracks". And there are only two """plans""" for regime change. (1) Get a critical mass of non-elite people to agree to switch to a new regime, but under the technically-allowed rules of the current regime, e.g., "The Final Election", which you maybe could just barely advocate in public without painting a target on your back, but, well, is anybody going to take you seriously and accept this as a serious plan?
Or (2) The other routes to regime change which you cannot even advocate for in public without getting thrown in solitary confinement, at best, let alone organize in preparation for when things go hot.
There was perhaps once a brief window of opportunity for (3) actually convince a critical mass of the current regime's aspirational "elites" that they are racing toward the edge of the waterfall, and that for their own sake even if no one else's, they should try to turn the ship around before it's too late. But it seems we are increasingly a post-persuasion society, as logic and evidence are patriarchal whiteness, or something.
So what is the plan for creating enough space for people to articulate serious plans without getting crushed?
There are also key points that can't be reasonably denied going into the second quarter of the 21st Century. First, that without internal unification in a chief executive of authority, responsibility, accountability, and "skin the game" alignment of interests, as well as external competition, you simply can't expect organizations to work well for long. And indeed, when we look for present and historical examples of very successful organizations big and small, this is the pattern we observe.
And USG doesn't follow this pattern, and is terrible at almost everything it does. Which is pretty bad, because, as we must live together in society despite all our differences, good government is essential to the good life. Almost any time one does see USG accomplish something impressive, a closer look reveals that whatever the rules might say, in reality, someone has been allowed to effectively run a program like a little kingdom.
More to the point, there *are* no tweaks or set of minor reforms that stand any chance of fixing any of that, because of the fundamental structure of USG and the way power works in American democracy. "You entire system of government is incurably insane."
What ends up happening in de facto theocratic oligopolies like ours is a runaway reaction of competitive sanctimony which slowly or quickly degenerates into complete leftist nuclear meltdown. This pattern easy to see in Anglo-American history, thankfully more mildly on average, and in the the French, Russian, and Chinese experiences, which were not so mild.
In those harsh instances, the way things ended was, well, monarchy-ish, as self-appointed dictators-for-life (doing it in the name of "the people", of course) took total control of the state and put an end to madness (and their political vulnerability from even more ideologically zealous fanatics), and they did it the hard way.
*"I'm going to France." - "You should go to China." - "I'm going to France." - "I'm from the FUTURE! You should go to China!"
Did Yarvin come up with that line (defamation?) about social justice being a Puritan thing? As a genealogical descendant of Puritans, I am extremely skeptical of this idea. Family reunions on that side make it clear to me that mostly everyone votes Republican. I took a class on critical race theory in law school, meanwhile, and everyone we read was either black or Jewish. Remember, places like Vermont voted solidly Republican until demographic change made it liberal. Old stock Americans did not change their voting habits.
If you can prove that genealogical descendants of Puritans vote for/adopt progressive ideas more than the typical American, then I am wrong. But I would bet if you investigated it, you would find that the 10 million or so descendants of the Puritans tend to vote Republican and are generally more conservative than the typical American. In fact, I would bet they are a lot more conservative than the typical American.
Many, arguably most, don't. It depends on what you count as a heresy too far to count as a descendant. Even if you just consider the Puritans, if you transported Jonathan Edwards 300 years to the present, he might well conclude he had zero ideological descendants close enough to be worthy of the title. If one is more heresy-tolerant when drawing lines of ideological decent, then maybe William Penn would see a billion Quakers unaware of and alienated from their nonconformist origins.
There are no bright lines for making different categories for similar things, so for example there are always debates between lumpers and splitters as to whether two groups of organisms should be thought of as being in the same or different species. Also just being a descendant of one thing doesn't mean one isn't also a descendant of a hundred other great, great, grandparent influences, and as centuries go by there is always too much hybrid cross-fertilization, innovation, and water under the bridge to draw neat, clean lines.
Still, it's hard not to notice that the Protestant Reformation kicked off a period of ideological competition and rapid change by rejecting the authority of morality stabilizing institutions, unleashing a kind of endless jihad against whatever the latest moral fashions deem to be intolerable transgression.
Jonathan Edwards's books are still read by Evangelical and Reformed Christians. You could read his sermons in many churches, and, aside from the language differences, they would fit right in. We're talking about at least tens of millions of people.
Jonathan Edwards is especially an interesting example, since he defended emotional reactions in the First Great Awakening--the kind of stuff you only encounter in Evangelical churches today.
I guess my simple point would be that Jonathan Edwards was a Christian minister and theologian. He continues to be read by Protestant ministers to this day. Edwards's primary contributions/ideas related to specific branches of Christianity, and tens of millions of people still practice in this tradition. His ideas did not give rise to racialist-Marxists (i.e., wokism)--unless you squint really hard and make the influence extremely indirect. This also applies to teasing out a connection between wokism and Martin Luther. Attributing wokism to Puritanism in any significant sense seems silly. Having said that, it is true (from what I have heard) that Unitarian churches (~150,000 old people) still organize themselves like Congregationalist churches.
A couple of the Supreme Court justices whose rulings helped aid the rise of the present non-sense--looking at you Earl Warren and William Douglas--did grow up Presbyterian... But they rejected the faith of their fathers. Most of the justices of that era appear to be Episcopalian. Blaming Puritans for the actions of Episcopalians seems unfair to say the least!
"if universities have gone woke, it’s for the same reason that tech companies, nonprofits, media, etc. have gone woke. In other words, students aren’t indoctrinated by their professors as much as they indoctrinate each other, because when you put a lot of people who are selected on wokeness together they wokify each other even more. In turn, this creates pressure on university professors and administrators to become woker, for exactly the same reasons that newsrooms, companies, etc. become woker as a result of the influx of woke young people into their workforce."
(Surprised I haven't seen you cite Lemoine before. If I were to say who is the smartest person on the internet who comes close to sharing your value system, it would be him.)
Physics is full of conservation laws: Conservation of Energy (the total amount of energy in any closed system is constant), Conservation of Matter (the total amount of matter in any closed system is constant), Conservation of Momentum (the total amount of momentum in any isolated system is constant), Conservation of Angular Momentum (the total amount of angular momentum in any isolated system is constant).
I've always wondered if there are any conservation laws in human society--which like any laws dealing with humans are going to be fuzzy. Rob Henderson even uses the word: "There seems to be a law of moral conservation. When societies relax their moral attitudes about some transgressions, people fill the void with new ones."
Or perhaps holding at one and the same time the belief that we have a moral duty to end (non-human) animal suffering and on the other hand we have no moral duty at all to a fetus.
This might be some sort of conservation: a person contributes to an environmental organization to fight global warming, and then feels it is okay to fly to a far-off vacation destination even though that generates large amounts of CO2.
"You wonder why all the American elites are on the same side ideologically? Because they were trained at these institutions. Because the ideology into which they have been groomed is their normal. Because dissent is not allowed."
I get where this is coming from and to some degree I agree but this isn't really true. At least not yet.
- Just picking three I know a little about, would anyone argue Steven Pinker, Lawrence Summers, or Roland Fryer are part of that ideology? What about Steven Levitt who graduated undergrad at Harvard?
- Over three hundred Harvard professors signed a letter questioning Claudine Gay's letter Oct 10. That's a pretty big number who dissented on that issue.
Levitt is 56. Fryer is 46. Maybe there are younger ones, maybe not but to anger ones are less likely to be well known. And people tend to become more conservative as they age. Not everyone but far more than what become more liberal.
I listened to the congressional testimony linked on Rod Dreher's blog https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1732179418787783089 and I'm perplexed by what seems like a 180 on the right, maybe on the left too. I don't get the calls for restricting ALL speech suggesting genocide of Jews. This seems EXACTLY like what I'd expect from the left. (I don't know about these university Presidents.) To be more specific, what if there was a call for university code of conduct to restrict racist statements? Should the university Presidents agree all racists statements go against the code? Would context matter? What if someone said all racial inequity is racism and any other attempts to explain inequity is racist? Is all racism still wrong and against a just code of conduct?
Yes, I get that a racist statement isn't quite the same as a call to violence but I think that misses my point. There can be disagreement on what statements are actually racist and what statements actually encourage violence. Maybe a better example is Jan 6 where Trump said go peacefully to the Capitol yet there is disagreement on whether he still implied violence. In any of these three cases, I don't see how context doesn't matter and how, even with context, it isn't immensely difficult to determine what speech is punishable conduct.
The question of whether moral norms are arbitrary – I choose to start from the position of objective reality, that is, right and wrong exists outside of and apart from human construction or whatever I find convenient to believe. The goodness and badness of some things are true regardless of who you are or your beliefs. Obviously, relativism argues against this by citing shifting cultures, history, perspective, etc., but this opens the door for the arbitrary adding or subtracting to the objective set of morals. At least in my viewpoint, the “subjective” or arbitrary morals can be, and often are, used for manipulation and power. All of this falls back under the heading of people believe what they want to believe for whatever purposes they want to achieve. Pessimistic? Yes.
"The goodness and badness of some things are true regardless of who you are or your beliefs."
Some things? Maybe. Probably. But I think that is at most a pretty small part of morality.
- Is al killing wrong? How do we decide when it isn't? That gets really difficult pretty quickly.
- Morality requires balancing not just Kling's three languages AND Haidt's five or six moral foundations BUT probably some other set of considerations too. We all have a different idea where the sweet spot lies and few if any have thought this through completely and precisely. Never mind consensus opinion, just one individual's opinion changes over their life and even day by day.
Hate is fun, especially when combined with a feeling of moral superiority. Moral superiority, which most folk want to have for themselves, is a ranking like status. To go up in the ranks, someone else needs to come down. Rob’s Luxury Beliefs are a new moral ranking among the elite who, like H. Biden so far, don’t suffer bad consequences much for immoral actions.
Unlike wealth, where it’s possible for all to be absolutely wealthy, even a society of highly “moral” folk, very honest & law abiding as in Japan, nevertheless have value rankings with half below average. Also true of IQs, many of whom think that higher IQs means higher moral status, like the Ivy+ presidents.
Rod Dreher’s note is also so important, that the inability to tell the truth without punishment* is so important, but missing in colleges. (Should I add that it’s also missing from those who concede that govt censorship of the truth about a candidate is bad, yet if done it doesn’t mean the election was stolen?) is a human fetus deserving of human rights like life? Are Black IQs lower than whites because of genetics? Are women genetically less likely to be math geniuses?
The truth is probably yes, yes, yes, but the Woke liars will claim no, no, no. With non-legal but alt-moral based punishment for Larry Summers & Charles Murray & Amy Wax for noticing the truth which falsifies IQ & genetics equality beliefs. Who deserves human rights protection is far more subjective, but all major religions are somewhat, or strongly, pro-life.
When my wife was a Slovak delegate to the ‘95 UN Convention on Women, young & pregnant & English speaking, she relates a difference between Chinese women and Western women about the meaning of “Reproductive Rights”. The One Child Policy Chinese thought it meant Right to Reproduce, no forced abortion. Hillary Clinton and most Westerners pushed universal support for abortion. The translations were not consistent about what the phrase meant. If it really meant Right to Not Reproduce, it should be Anti-Reproductive Rights.
One effective way to lie to oneself is to change the meaning of a word. (Of what ‘is’ is) Moral Superiority then follows, but it is false. Tho, when the ‘truth’ depends on power, rather than logic, folks will avoid or minimize their agreement except when they can use the power to punish others.
Hate is fun.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome is based on hate based on lies, against Israel, against Trump, against Amy Wax.
We need more truth, including uncertainty and consistent, fixed definitions of words that express truth.
Only then will we able to, as the Flintstones said, ‘have a gay old time’.
re: steam, don't miss this excellent overview of "Why No Roman Industrial Revolution" that explains all the various near-misses throughout history and concludes that Britain was just lucky to have the right combination of factors that made the industrial revolution possible. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
That steam (and suction) device explainer was so great - thank you!
Scott's piece is paywalled, so I'll offer my own take on Neoreaction.
1) Something something...we get a monarchy is not a serious plan of action.
2) Authoritarian rule got a really bad eye from COVID. Curtis was a huge booster of COVID restrictions, masking, and China's Zero COVID.
3) The revolt against wokeness has largely been a populist revolt, but Moldbug hates populists.
What, and just going to hell by sticking with the system we have is a serious plan? A plan for what, disaster*?
I can say, "We need to get this bus off the railroad tracks," and someone could retort, "Okay Einstein, what's your plan for freeing that wheel twisted around the rail?" And, sure, they have a point. But also, I have a point.
The problem is that what the analysis reveals is that nothing short of what would qualify as "regime change" is the equivalent of "get the bus off the tracks". And there are only two """plans""" for regime change. (1) Get a critical mass of non-elite people to agree to switch to a new regime, but under the technically-allowed rules of the current regime, e.g., "The Final Election", which you maybe could just barely advocate in public without painting a target on your back, but, well, is anybody going to take you seriously and accept this as a serious plan?
Or (2) The other routes to regime change which you cannot even advocate for in public without getting thrown in solitary confinement, at best, let alone organize in preparation for when things go hot.
There was perhaps once a brief window of opportunity for (3) actually convince a critical mass of the current regime's aspirational "elites" that they are racing toward the edge of the waterfall, and that for their own sake even if no one else's, they should try to turn the ship around before it's too late. But it seems we are increasingly a post-persuasion society, as logic and evidence are patriarchal whiteness, or something.
So what is the plan for creating enough space for people to articulate serious plans without getting crushed?
There are also key points that can't be reasonably denied going into the second quarter of the 21st Century. First, that without internal unification in a chief executive of authority, responsibility, accountability, and "skin the game" alignment of interests, as well as external competition, you simply can't expect organizations to work well for long. And indeed, when we look for present and historical examples of very successful organizations big and small, this is the pattern we observe.
And USG doesn't follow this pattern, and is terrible at almost everything it does. Which is pretty bad, because, as we must live together in society despite all our differences, good government is essential to the good life. Almost any time one does see USG accomplish something impressive, a closer look reveals that whatever the rules might say, in reality, someone has been allowed to effectively run a program like a little kingdom.
More to the point, there *are* no tweaks or set of minor reforms that stand any chance of fixing any of that, because of the fundamental structure of USG and the way power works in American democracy. "You entire system of government is incurably insane."
What ends up happening in de facto theocratic oligopolies like ours is a runaway reaction of competitive sanctimony which slowly or quickly degenerates into complete leftist nuclear meltdown. This pattern easy to see in Anglo-American history, thankfully more mildly on average, and in the the French, Russian, and Chinese experiences, which were not so mild.
In those harsh instances, the way things ended was, well, monarchy-ish, as self-appointed dictators-for-life (doing it in the name of "the people", of course) took total control of the state and put an end to madness (and their political vulnerability from even more ideologically zealous fanatics), and they did it the hard way.
*"I'm going to France." - "You should go to China." - "I'm going to France." - "I'm from the FUTURE! You should go to China!"
Did Yarvin come up with that line (defamation?) about social justice being a Puritan thing? As a genealogical descendant of Puritans, I am extremely skeptical of this idea. Family reunions on that side make it clear to me that mostly everyone votes Republican. I took a class on critical race theory in law school, meanwhile, and everyone we read was either black or Jewish. Remember, places like Vermont voted solidly Republican until demographic change made it liberal. Old stock Americans did not change their voting habits.
If you can prove that genealogical descendants of Puritans vote for/adopt progressive ideas more than the typical American, then I am wrong. But I would bet if you investigated it, you would find that the 10 million or so descendants of the Puritans tend to vote Republican and are generally more conservative than the typical American. In fact, I would bet they are a lot more conservative than the typical American.
Most Christians are not genealogical descendants of 1st Century Christians, but they are ideological descendants.
Their ideological descendants go to church!
Many, arguably most, don't. It depends on what you count as a heresy too far to count as a descendant. Even if you just consider the Puritans, if you transported Jonathan Edwards 300 years to the present, he might well conclude he had zero ideological descendants close enough to be worthy of the title. If one is more heresy-tolerant when drawing lines of ideological decent, then maybe William Penn would see a billion Quakers unaware of and alienated from their nonconformist origins.
There are no bright lines for making different categories for similar things, so for example there are always debates between lumpers and splitters as to whether two groups of organisms should be thought of as being in the same or different species. Also just being a descendant of one thing doesn't mean one isn't also a descendant of a hundred other great, great, grandparent influences, and as centuries go by there is always too much hybrid cross-fertilization, innovation, and water under the bridge to draw neat, clean lines.
Still, it's hard not to notice that the Protestant Reformation kicked off a period of ideological competition and rapid change by rejecting the authority of morality stabilizing institutions, unleashing a kind of endless jihad against whatever the latest moral fashions deem to be intolerable transgression.
Jonathan Edwards's books are still read by Evangelical and Reformed Christians. You could read his sermons in many churches, and, aside from the language differences, they would fit right in. We're talking about at least tens of millions of people.
Jonathan Edwards is especially an interesting example, since he defended emotional reactions in the First Great Awakening--the kind of stuff you only encounter in Evangelical churches today.
I guess my simple point would be that Jonathan Edwards was a Christian minister and theologian. He continues to be read by Protestant ministers to this day. Edwards's primary contributions/ideas related to specific branches of Christianity, and tens of millions of people still practice in this tradition. His ideas did not give rise to racialist-Marxists (i.e., wokism)--unless you squint really hard and make the influence extremely indirect. This also applies to teasing out a connection between wokism and Martin Luther. Attributing wokism to Puritanism in any significant sense seems silly. Having said that, it is true (from what I have heard) that Unitarian churches (~150,000 old people) still organize themselves like Congregationalist churches.
A couple of the Supreme Court justices whose rulings helped aid the rise of the present non-sense--looking at you Earl Warren and William Douglas--did grow up Presbyterian... But they rejected the faith of their fathers. Most of the justices of that era appear to be Episcopalian. Blaming Puritans for the actions of Episcopalians seems unfair to say the least!
Regarding the issues Dreher is talking about, see https://www.philippelemoine.com/p/is-wokeness-on-the-way-out
"if universities have gone woke, it’s for the same reason that tech companies, nonprofits, media, etc. have gone woke. In other words, students aren’t indoctrinated by their professors as much as they indoctrinate each other, because when you put a lot of people who are selected on wokeness together they wokify each other even more. In turn, this creates pressure on university professors and administrators to become woker, for exactly the same reasons that newsrooms, companies, etc. become woker as a result of the influx of woke young people into their workforce."
(Surprised I haven't seen you cite Lemoine before. If I were to say who is the smartest person on the internet who comes close to sharing your value system, it would be him.)
Physics is full of conservation laws: Conservation of Energy (the total amount of energy in any closed system is constant), Conservation of Matter (the total amount of matter in any closed system is constant), Conservation of Momentum (the total amount of momentum in any isolated system is constant), Conservation of Angular Momentum (the total amount of angular momentum in any isolated system is constant).
I've always wondered if there are any conservation laws in human society--which like any laws dealing with humans are going to be fuzzy. Rob Henderson even uses the word: "There seems to be a law of moral conservation. When societies relax their moral attitudes about some transgressions, people fill the void with new ones."
Or perhaps holding at one and the same time the belief that we have a moral duty to end (non-human) animal suffering and on the other hand we have no moral duty at all to a fetus.
Pointing toward a statement of the first: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-enduring-challenge-for-any-activist.html
This might be some sort of conservation: a person contributes to an environmental organization to fight global warming, and then feels it is okay to fly to a far-off vacation destination even though that generates large amounts of CO2.
"You wonder why all the American elites are on the same side ideologically? Because they were trained at these institutions. Because the ideology into which they have been groomed is their normal. Because dissent is not allowed."
I get where this is coming from and to some degree I agree but this isn't really true. At least not yet.
- Just picking three I know a little about, would anyone argue Steven Pinker, Lawrence Summers, or Roland Fryer are part of that ideology? What about Steven Levitt who graduated undergrad at Harvard?
- Over three hundred Harvard professors signed a letter questioning Claudine Gay's letter Oct 10. That's a pretty big number who dissented on that issue.
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2023/war-in-the-middle-east/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRrU_R4lJMubYBFX5KePu9RclIerKeXVWtEFKHvsetG7sXUTFdDfLF9TBJDe_Qra2Pmf1gMbyfdrJdJ/pub
Yes, but note that everyone you mention is old. They are aging out of the system.
Levitt is 56. Fryer is 46. Maybe there are younger ones, maybe not but to anger ones are less likely to be well known. And people tend to become more conservative as they age. Not everyone but far more than what become more liberal.
I listened to the congressional testimony linked on Rod Dreher's blog https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1732179418787783089 and I'm perplexed by what seems like a 180 on the right, maybe on the left too. I don't get the calls for restricting ALL speech suggesting genocide of Jews. This seems EXACTLY like what I'd expect from the left. (I don't know about these university Presidents.) To be more specific, what if there was a call for university code of conduct to restrict racist statements? Should the university Presidents agree all racists statements go against the code? Would context matter? What if someone said all racial inequity is racism and any other attempts to explain inequity is racist? Is all racism still wrong and against a just code of conduct?
Yes, I get that a racist statement isn't quite the same as a call to violence but I think that misses my point. There can be disagreement on what statements are actually racist and what statements actually encourage violence. Maybe a better example is Jan 6 where Trump said go peacefully to the Capitol yet there is disagreement on whether he still implied violence. In any of these three cases, I don't see how context doesn't matter and how, even with context, it isn't immensely difficult to determine what speech is punishable conduct.
The question of whether moral norms are arbitrary – I choose to start from the position of objective reality, that is, right and wrong exists outside of and apart from human construction or whatever I find convenient to believe. The goodness and badness of some things are true regardless of who you are or your beliefs. Obviously, relativism argues against this by citing shifting cultures, history, perspective, etc., but this opens the door for the arbitrary adding or subtracting to the objective set of morals. At least in my viewpoint, the “subjective” or arbitrary morals can be, and often are, used for manipulation and power. All of this falls back under the heading of people believe what they want to believe for whatever purposes they want to achieve. Pessimistic? Yes.
"The goodness and badness of some things are true regardless of who you are or your beliefs."
Some things? Maybe. Probably. But I think that is at most a pretty small part of morality.
- Is al killing wrong? How do we decide when it isn't? That gets really difficult pretty quickly.
- Morality requires balancing not just Kling's three languages AND Haidt's five or six moral foundations BUT probably some other set of considerations too. We all have a different idea where the sweet spot lies and few if any have thought this through completely and precisely. Never mind consensus opinion, just one individual's opinion changes over their life and even day by day.
Hate is fun, especially when combined with a feeling of moral superiority. Moral superiority, which most folk want to have for themselves, is a ranking like status. To go up in the ranks, someone else needs to come down. Rob’s Luxury Beliefs are a new moral ranking among the elite who, like H. Biden so far, don’t suffer bad consequences much for immoral actions.
Unlike wealth, where it’s possible for all to be absolutely wealthy, even a society of highly “moral” folk, very honest & law abiding as in Japan, nevertheless have value rankings with half below average. Also true of IQs, many of whom think that higher IQs means higher moral status, like the Ivy+ presidents.
Rod Dreher’s note is also so important, that the inability to tell the truth without punishment* is so important, but missing in colleges. (Should I add that it’s also missing from those who concede that govt censorship of the truth about a candidate is bad, yet if done it doesn’t mean the election was stolen?) is a human fetus deserving of human rights like life? Are Black IQs lower than whites because of genetics? Are women genetically less likely to be math geniuses?
The truth is probably yes, yes, yes, but the Woke liars will claim no, no, no. With non-legal but alt-moral based punishment for Larry Summers & Charles Murray & Amy Wax for noticing the truth which falsifies IQ & genetics equality beliefs. Who deserves human rights protection is far more subjective, but all major religions are somewhat, or strongly, pro-life.
When my wife was a Slovak delegate to the ‘95 UN Convention on Women, young & pregnant & English speaking, she relates a difference between Chinese women and Western women about the meaning of “Reproductive Rights”. The One Child Policy Chinese thought it meant Right to Reproduce, no forced abortion. Hillary Clinton and most Westerners pushed universal support for abortion. The translations were not consistent about what the phrase meant. If it really meant Right to Not Reproduce, it should be Anti-Reproductive Rights.
One effective way to lie to oneself is to change the meaning of a word. (Of what ‘is’ is) Moral Superiority then follows, but it is false. Tho, when the ‘truth’ depends on power, rather than logic, folks will avoid or minimize their agreement except when they can use the power to punish others.
Hate is fun.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome is based on hate based on lies, against Israel, against Trump, against Amy Wax.
We need more truth, including uncertainty and consistent, fixed definitions of words that express truth.
Only then will we able to, as the Flintstones said, ‘have a gay old time’.
re: steam, don't miss this excellent overview of "Why No Roman Industrial Revolution" that explains all the various near-misses throughout history and concludes that Britain was just lucky to have the right combination of factors that made the industrial revolution possible. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
"social justice movement as a Puritan revival and a tool for what he called the Brahmin class" (mixing metaphors)
I'd like to hear why you think this is mixed metaphors.
The Brahmins didn’t come over on the Mayflower
Hm... well, not all of them, it's true
I always liked Binmore's paper on this: http://www.evoecon.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Paper/2006-14.pdf
Epic final sentence.