That doesn't mesh with the victim-hood Olympics that have been going on for decades. "The group that can claim the most oppression wins!" is not a celebration of strength, it's a new arbitrary value for determining which group gets to rule over the others, which you claimed was the antithesis of the ideology.
Have you never actually attended any events where this sort of stuff is brought up? The last time I went to an event discussing sexual harassment I was told to use the term "survivor" rather than "victim" specifically because survivor has a connotation of strength while victim has a connotation of weakness. If leftists placed zero value on strength, then why would that even be an issue?
I've never denied that leftists don't want to invent arbitrary new values for determining which group gets to rule over other groups! With the exception of some anarchists whose politics I find unrealistic, I fully accept that the essence of all politics is selecting values which entitle one's own group to rule over one's enemy groups. As a leftist I simply believe that the group that should rule is the urban working class and the group that should be subjugated is, well, you.
I know your a troll, but never let it be said I do not debate. Cetashwayo.
I'm flattered, but unfortunately that's not me. I'm ChineseDrone on SV.
A complete misreading of my position. I don't think leftists and liberals believe difference doesn't exist, they obviously do else they wouldn't whine about inequality and have fifty academic sub divisions for varieties of grievance politics, that is politics based on the difference of X and Y. My position is they want no difference, or at least no meaningful difference. Perhaps even to eradicate the concept of difference from human conception all together.
Alright then, find me one leftist who argues that there
shouldn't be any differences in physical strength between human beings and that you
shouldn't be less strong than an Icelandic strongman. I'm waiting.
Most leftists want to abolish particular forms of differences that some people currently acknowledge--between, say, different races, for instance. That's not the same thing as wanting to abolish
all difference--leftists aren't hostile to the
concept of difference, merely to particular differences that, for some ideological reason or another (which is far from uniform), they consider illegitimate. Even in a hypothetical leftist utopia some people are going to be physically stronger than other people for instance, lol, and no one has a problem with that. Like, why would Marx have said "from each according to his ability" if he wanted a world where everyone had the exact same abilities?
I think you've misread myself and the OP. There is no Bailey that we retreat to, as what we are advocating is forthright in its general unpalatableness and doesn't need a bailey. YOC is less colorful and flamboyant than I am, but we are advocating firstly-inequality is a good thing. Not inequality exists which is obvious and doesn't need to be debated. The left and liberals argue more or less the opposite. Inequality exists and its bad.
I don't really see why you're compelled to make a point about how you're physically inferior to some Icelandic strongman, then. If that was just an exaggerated rhetorical flourish then I'd beseech you not to allow such exaggerated rhetoric to obscure your actual point.
I don't think I brought up christian ethics. My reference to virtue was far more generalist. I meant it in a more aristotelian sense than a christian sense. As it is, I am tentatively in agreement with Machiavelli that christian ethics do not provide a good program when it comes to ruling effectively. As it is, the beautitudes were never intended for kings and presidents.
Was responding to Meerkat/YOC/Heterosexual there, although it's good to know that your self-proclaimed faith is as hypocritical as it appeared!
Alright its clear we're talking past each other here, your clearly some sort of moral relativist. It is an axiom to say intelligence is more important than compassion, and virtue more important than say mere imagination. Of course you would disagree, but this isn't about what you believe.
I'm actually not a moral relativist lol, we were just arguing about how I was laying out my case for moral realism like two days ago. But if you have to declare things like "These particular values that I think are important are just important because they are, it's an axiom, shut up", I think that's a pretty strong indication of how weak your position is lol. I could just as easily say "my axiom is that Lord Invictus is a poo poo head who is wrong about everything" and then bam, I've won this argument and no force in the world can make me incorrect. If you're argument for why intelligence is more important than compassion is "I think it's more important than compassion so shut up" then you're idea of philosophy clearly hasn't advanced beyond Thales declaring that the world is made of water and telling everyone else to shut up when they questioned him.
As an aside I was throwing out the "why is intelligence more important than compassion" thing as a softball, lol. I'm absolutely of the opinion that intelligence (which is to say instrumental rationality, one's ability to optimally act to achieve one's goals) is more important for any actor to have than compassion, or in fact anything else, basically by definition since the purpose of any actor is to try to achieve its goals. It's the whole reason why democracy is good--democratic decisionmaking is consistently more intelligent than even the rule of some hypothetical 143IQ aristocrat (I would know, I am a 143IQ aristocrat and I make decisions that are stupid compared to the democratic consensus all the time), to say nothing of the later generations of average-intelligence-at-best aristocrats who will inevitably descend from the smart one.
Democracy has epistemic value--even if one entirely disregards the importance of diversity or liberal institutions, as I imagine you would, the random forest effect produced by vote-taking among weak learners is quite literally mathematically proven, and even computer scientists training ML models turn to democracy to solve hard AI problems. When I was doing ML research one of the things that my PI told me was that if you don't have any other ideas, you can always throw ensemble learning at a problem and probably get better results than your current model. Even the most intelligent of people are not
always intelligent about
all things. Individual people have high variance--every given individual, even the smartest one, is guaranteed to be disastrously wrong about some things.
Vote-taking among many learners--which is to say, democracy--greatly reduces variance, and thereby greatly increases the chance that society will at least achieve mediocrity. In a world where aristocrats getting things disastrously wrong leads to, you know, a lot of people dying, that's quite valuable!
You fail to say why these qualities do not entitle people to rule over those that lack them. As for reactionary political systems, I do not take it as a given they are inherently bad. Can they be? Well yes. And I'll be the first person to criticize today's ruling classes. At the same time, a benevolent aristocracy composed of men of both great intelligence and near angelic moral character is a far better system than whatever today's "democracy" is supposed to be. As it is, virtue and intelligence must be mutually supporting. Virtue without intelligence is merely fine words and admirable behavior, its a nice sleek car without an engine. Whereas intelligence without virtue is just cunning. Lacking any moral check or foundation.
It's rare to find someone making an argument where you can just directly quote Russel's Teapot in response nowadays, lol. You're the one establishing an extraordinary claim about why your particular arbitrarily chosen values, which you admit to be purely axiomatic, entitle people to rule. It's on you to provide proof for such a claim, not me to provide proof against it.
Moreover, how do you propose we identify these people of great intelligence and near angelic moral character? Can you even name one such person alive today?
How do you propose that such a class of aristocrats with great intelligence and near angelic moral character can maintain itself into the future, especially over multiple generations? Even with the most generous estimates, intelligence is not so heritable that one can assume that an aristocrat's great great grandson will be smart just because he is, and virtue is not heritable at all. If not through heredity, then how should a new class of aristocrats be selected each generation in such a way that avoids problems like assessment traps and nepotism among the aristocrats?
China had systems for selecting intelligent and virtuous rulers for over a thousand years, all of which were, in the historical grand scheme of things, quite successful relative to other premodern systems of government. How did that end for them again? Why won't your system end the exact same way?
Again not all, many. They do not reject difference, they want to eradicate difference.
Again a misreading, they despise these concepts and wish to deconstruct them and replace with the cult of ugliness and the cult of weakness. The fat acceptance movement and oppression olympics to use two modern examples.
Moreover leftists want us to look at something ugly and say its beautiful, so as one to implicate people in the lie, and two to make them disbelieve their own eyes. 2+2=5 Winston. They desire to do this because they want to destroy these things as objectively real, seeing them as mere imposed reifications. Not eternal and innately recognizable to man. They see them as merely imposed constructs because they hate them, like a child wanting to smash its parents expensive glass because it can't drink out of it.
It is our irrefutable contention Western standards of beauty are innately superior. Under represented minorities and other cultures may resent and hate this, in fact they absolutely do. But they should not be enabled in their resentment nor encouraged to see their own conceptions as anything approaching equal to Western ones. As you can tell, I reject deconstructionism and Critical Theory prima facie.
Do you... not see the inherent contradiction here? "Leftists hate beauty and want to replace beauty with ugliness because... they think their standard of beauty is better than our standard of beauty!"
Like, yeah, you, a conservative rural southerner, are quite likely to believe that your standard of beauty is innately superior because your way of life is superior. The leftists, who are multicultural urbanites, also believe that their standard of beauty is superior because their way of life is superior. That--conflict between friend and enemy groups--is indeed the way politics works
. All that remains is to see who wins. It's probably going to be us. Right-wing art hasn't exactly been doing well over the last hundred years.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I refer you to this Neolithic practice for dealing with urban growth. I see no reason given the advance of robotics and 3-D printing why similar policies in the future could not be implemented.
Dude, read the articles lol:
The purpose of burning these settlements is a subject of debate among scholars; some of the settlements were reconstructed several times on top of earlier habitational levels, preserving the shape and the orientation of the older buildings. One particular location; the
Poduri site in Romania, revealed thirteen habitation levels that were constructed on top of each other over many years
Yes indeed, urban reconstruction is an example of urban death!
I assume your familiar with the Khmer Rouge? Not that I am in any way advocating for Pol Pot's peculiar brand of revolutionary politics, but urbanites have been defeated, and forced to heel withn living memory of today.
Yes, and the people of Kampuchea now all live in the harmonic agrarian idyll of Year Zero, where the degeneracy of urbanity can never again affect the... oh wait no, Democratic Kampuchea lasted 4 years and was invaded and destroyed with laughable ease by a Vietnamese government that
didn't reject urbanity and thus had a superior industrial base and military resources which allowed them to roll over Kampuchea with pathetic ease despite only being 4 years removed from one of the most devastating wars in the country's history. This is indeed how urbanity will be destroyed.
That's the thing about technological progress--it's impossible to stop precisely because it confers competitive advantages, and any society that
is willing to halt or reverse technological progress within its own borders will inevitably--and rapidly--be outcompeted and destroyed by all the other societies that do not. If the West decides to halt technological development to destroy urbanization, tomorrow you will see Chinese ships on its shores. If China does the same, then tomorrow you will see Indian ships on
its shores. And so on and so on.
What you desire would require the simultaneous revolution by every society in the world, all against an urbanity fed by technoloical change which is growing in power in every country in the world at every minute and second. When the ultraleftist Marxists insist that the global revolution of the world proletariat is achievable, they at least have a great deal of pseudoscience make it seem half-plausible. Where's your evidence? What hope do you have?