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a-thousand-pots · 17 hours ago

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It's no secret I hate Communists, like, a lot. And I don't like how the rules are always different for Communism. But there are still leftists who I like and whose opinions I respect even as I disagree with important and fundamental premises. I know I have followers more right-leaning than me, and my posts filter from them to actually right-wing people. And I yell at Communists, like, a lot. But sometimes I am disagreeing with someone like @prudencepaccard and someone like @siryouarebeingmocked starts to pile on and I'm like "No, no, pull back, this isn't the same thing, this is a good-faith disagreement with someone who I respect but think is wrong or maybe just want to find out why they think something!"

So I felt for some reason like I should explain that part. Given I know enough about myself to know I'm not going to personally remember to make this clear in every post, and how hostile I usually come across, and how that OFTEN but not ALWAYS corresponds to hostility I want to express, and how my comfort level with that form of hostility is different from other people.

All the good people aren't on one ideological side and all the bad people aren't under the other. I don't believe anyone is intentionally evil in their goals, not even Communists, not even Nazis. I think their ultimate sin is intellectual laziness. But also... all of us are intellectually lazy. You, me, that guy. There's a certain level of it we just can't hold against anyone any more than we could hold the inability to fly unassisted against them.

extremely long and rambly and too many examples:

I think extremists have worldviews that, if true, would justify their beliefs. If the things Nazis and Communists believed about the Jews were true, then what the Nazis and Communists wanted to do to them would be a good idea. And of course the majority of those worldviews are made up to justify the beliefs they already held, but all of us do that anyway and also people inherit worldviews made up to justify beliefs other people held and go "this seems to check out."

The reason most people believe that you should not adopt the Nazi worldview boils down to "because the social consensus I respect says it is evil and heavily socially sanctions it." Nazis totally lean into "our opponents say we're evil so we'll just revel in it" but again a bunch of other people do this anyway and it's not considered discrediting. Communists of course do this and explicitly justify their actions with "if you're going to think this of m anyway I might as well." LGBT advocates go "you know what fuck it I AM coming for your children." Religious people willingly embrace fire-and-brimstone or censorious-church-lady archetypes. Veterans of modern wars willingly embrace archetypes of being dumb redneck jarheads and wear patches with slogans not too far from "evil imperialist baby-killer." Hell, the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" was originally about how stupid Americans were! When your opponents do it it's because they're revealing all your fantasies about them were true, and when your allies do it it's an act of defiance against hegemony / having fun pissing off people who hate them anyway.

"This set of ideas is heavily socially sanctioned" doesn't prove they're evil because you don't think that is true of ideas you agree with and "the people holding these ideas confirm my fantasies of how evil and bad they are" doesn't prove they're evil because you don't think that is true of ideas you agree with.

The reason that people shouldn't adopt the worldview of Nazism or Communism is that it's wrong. It's completely incorrect. And everyone has the ability to figure that out by just walking through the set of beliefs and their consequences. You think about what has to be true to line up with this belief system and realize it's internally incoherent. Like walking through the plot holes in a movie. Wait, if Rose Tico was going to ram Finn to stop him from doing a suicide attack, why did she let everyone get in their flight suits and gas up the speeders and taxi out onto the runway when I know that takes a lot of time? Like that was the plan the whole time, right, since there was no other way the speeder could have done anything. Was she sitting there that whole time not saying anything? You'd think she'd speak up earlier, when there wasn't a chance of being shot down.

Instead of just saying "they refuse to stop being evil which proves I should get to hurt them!" you go "Wait. Why would they refuse to stop being evil? If the Jews got kicked out of 130-something countries for being too evil, how come they didn't notice the trend happening at like 50 and decide to cut it out to make their own lives easier? NONE of them did that? And how do you destroy a country with usury anyway, like, how does it work? Is there a country that got destroyed with usury -- none of them? Nobody ever fucked up their defense against the Jews badly enough that they failed? That doesn't seem right because I know people fuck up their defense of things I think are important all the time. And wow, this seems like a really important thing to get right. If Jews are behind all the evils of the world, they should be purged, but if they're not, I feel like at the very least I am going to be in a lot of trouble regardless of my views on the inherent sanctity of life. I guess we say that only my race matters, but wait, if that was true, then..."

And instead of just saying "The world's billionaires could buy us out of homelessness and poverty without being any less rich, but they refuse to out of greed!" you go "Wait. Why would they refuse to buy us out of homelessness and poverty? I know they do things for PR, because I see them do it and warn everyone it's a scheme to trick people into not wanting to kill them. But wouldn't buying everyone out of homelessness be the best PR move ever? I know that the bourgeoise are afraid of the power of the proletariat and every act of liberalism that improves people's lives is really part of their scheme to prevent Communism. And I know Communism's victory is inevitable. So why hasn't one of them ever just said 'fuck it I want to be in the good graces of the winning side' and just bought everyone a house? How do they all agree on their class interest, anyway? I know other Marxists constantly disagree about what we should do. Are the bourgeoise doing that? And wow, this sems like something really important to get right. If the rich are hoarding enough resources that if we took them and gave them out then everyone could live a happy life without having to work, then we should do that. But if they don't have that much, then I will have caused a lot of destruction for nothing. And didn't Marx say that we had enough resources to distribute to the world and give everyone a happy life when we had, like, half a percent of what we do now?"

"Wait. If cooking food gives you cancer, but everyone who isn't a raw-food vegan cooks their food, how come everyone in the world doesn't have cancer? It seems like the highest amount it can cause cancer by is the amount that people who aren't raw-food vegans think is the normal rate of cancer happening, which is super rare. And then that's also minus all the other things I know cause cancer, like smoking. And wait, if you can cure cancer by having six months of a raw food diet, how come nobody really cures their cancer with six months of a raw food diet? You'd think it would be all over the news instead of like one person every five or ten years claiming so. And man, this seems like it's really important to get right, because if curing cancer is easy then I should tell everyone to do the easy thing, but if it isn't, then I'm telling people not to treat a serious illness, and that would be bad."

Etc.

I'm a liberaltarian because I think it has the best failure mode. I'm not the most intellectually rigorous person in the world, I picked the ideology that says "well if I'm wrong about this, someone can figure that out and then do something about it themselves because they can probably make money off of it." There might be some places that doesn't work, but my standard for declaring that is very high. I picked the one where you don't have to be right about everything as long as people can keep trying shit out themselves. There are people who are leftists who I think are wrong, but whom I respect, because I think they arrived at their opinions in good faith and just the same amount of intellectual laziness that everyone has since none of us are Brainitor the Logicnificent. They have gone through what they think and asked "wait but if that's true..." and figured out something that mostly holds together.

There are a lot of people who call themselves "socialists" that I think are fundamentally on my side because they agree with me about how people make decisions and allocate resources instead of how Marxists think those things happen, but think there are other things that we can do to juice up those decisions and allocations, or think Marx had other useful things to say. "Rich people could help a lot more than they are" or "this problem could be better if we changed allocations of resources in this way" may be right or may be wrong but if they're wrong they're not the same kind of wrong as "rich people have enough wealth to solve all the problems and refuse to," even though the people who say the latter claim they just mean the former when confronted.

There are people who have walked through the consequences of their beliefs and answered the "wait if that was true" questions for leftism. And I think that by doing that we agree about most of how things happen in the world, because I'm not some genius who was the only one who could come up with that. People aren't always on the same page and people aren't always loyal to abstract concepts and they disagree about the best thing to do or they say "well fuck you guys I'm selling you out" and any ideology that requires that level of coordination or unity or people not doing easier things that seem like good ideas is going to need you to not ask questions about how that works. I think that if you start at Marx and then follow the chain of logic and patch the things that don't make sense you end up at something that isn't Marx and isn't compatible with Marx but I can't really get too mad at someone if they think "well that's where I started and I didn't change my mind about what to support so I'm a leftist." They don't have a worldview that falls apart after thirty seconds of thinking about it. They think (IIUC) that certain classes of society generally have similar material interests even if they don't match up 100% of the time, and the maintenance of this equilibrium doesn't require nobody to defect, it requires for individual acts to not matter that much and the general trend to favor one direction and for it to not be possible in the system of distribution for big high-caliber changes to happen at once.

I think "the market will solve everything eventually but there are certain things that the market will take too long to solve and create too much suffering in the meantime so we should artificially solve them; we just have to be super careful doing that because whatever we do is going to be way worse than what the market sorts out." If you think "yeah the market can in theory solve things but the number of problems that the market would take too long to solve is a lot higher than brazenautomaton thinks and we should be more proactive in solving them ourselves" then obviously by definition I don't agree with you but I get how you got there in good faith. It's not the same as "the market exists to never solve problems and make people suffer." That's a position you can't have thought through. "It's good to establish precedents for strong labor unions so that employees have a better negotiating position" isn't the same as "everything a union does is inherently moral and just."

...I think there is an alternate universe where this dynamic is true of far-right ideas, even if it's not this one. I think the social sanction here means that if you walk through all the things that don't line up, you don't call yourself far-right any more. And obviously they wouldn't hold the beliefs specifically about Jews, which leftists who think through their positions also have to completely leave behind (For historically contingent reasons Jews are shaped like the hole labeled "EVILDOERS" in that worldview, and if you abandon the idea of that shape of evildoers you can no longer fit Jews into it or anyone else for that matter). But at least a couple people hold the position of "look I would like it if races could live together in harmony but it isn't working and we should stop trying to force it to," and like, I don't think it's correct, but it's at least internally coherent. And they often turn out to be hateful racist supremacists but I'm not sure if that happens at a higher rate than the baseline. And if you think white people and black people can never get along and multicultural society is sinful and against God and your response to this is to move into a remote cabin in Idaho away from everyone else, gotta say, you have that "fail gracefully" part pretty well handled, cannot fault you for that.

This was long and pointless, why did you read this far. I need a haircut.

#read later

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