Philosophy Inequality is GOOD.

'Fat acceptance' being an excellent example and the most blatant of these. It's good to reject the 'anorexic model' standard of beauty, but it is even less healthy to try to push the idea that being grossly overweight is perfectly healthy. It's one thing to be modestly overweight; more discipline would be good for such people (which includes myself), but when you're morbidly obese, to say that you're healthy just the way you are is a lie. To demand that people find you attractive even though you're not only unhealthy, but so unhealthy that you can't bear children?


the fat acceptance movment quickly got bizzare for me. When it first came about I thought it was trying to shed light on like female profesional wrestlers and powerlifters and such, people who are very big yes but also very strong and pretty athletic.
EX 1:

Ex 2:


Instead what it is, you got couch potatoes who have a hard time getting out of bed saying without passing out saying " *Huff huff* I'm just as healthy *huff* as any woman *Huff Huff* and if you don't agree well well your a fatphobic *Huff*"

no honey your not healthy, sitting on the computer all day eating burgers and pizza does not make you stronger, if it did I'd be superman. If your going to be supersized you'll want to make sure you've got the muscles to support it. I'm actually confused as to why femenist don't encourage our women in the states to get more involved in strength based sports considering they want them to be able to run around with the boys at some point at least that's what they keep saying, and honestly if this was the case I'd be on board.

Also what femenist need to understand is not everybody is going to find you attractive. people like what they like. As I've pointed out earlier I'm deep south appalachian typically our attraction of a woman is determined by the size of her waistline and whether she can carry a piglet in each arm. (Ok slight exaggeration, but you get the picture.) Not everyone is like that, In fact, most aren't. To say someone is a bigot for simply having an attraction to certain kinds of people is idiotic at best, and straight up dangerous at worst.
 
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D

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I know your a troll, but never let it be said I do not debate. Cetashwayo.

Really this is such a perfect example of the motte and bailey employed by most reactionaries in defending their notion of inequality that I couldn't have asked for a better strawman. Literally nobody disputes the idea that things are different from other things, and that differences on scales of measurements exist. Not even the world's most extreme postmodernist refuses to accept the fact that you are weaker than a strongman or less intelligent than me. Nobody in the world believes that human beings are literally identical in all things.
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.


What people object to is the part where you say that "therefore, people who are perform better on these particular scales of measurement which I have arbitrarily selected as being the most important should have power to rule over those who do not". More broadly, while both your post and the OP are presented as a straightforward defense of the concept of differences existing between things (the bailey, where you profess exceptional courage in defending a concept accepted by every human being over a few months old), the actual meat of what you're arguing is a much less self-evidently true combination of the following:
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.

Certain nebulously defined qualities such as intelligence and moral character/virtue are correctly defined by some particular scale of measurement you believe to be correct (IQ or some sort of Christian ethics, respectively)

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.

These particular qualities are what makes some people better than other people on an absolute scale, rather than merely in whatever particular quality is being discussed.

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.

These particular qualities entitle people to rule over others, and not other qualities such as artistic talent, compassion, altruism, etc.
  1. Moreover, these particular qualities entitle people to rule over others in a reactionary political system, generally characterized by immense and unaccountable power being given to a class of hereditary aristocrats

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.

  1. All liberals and leftists reject the basic concept that some human beings are different than each other in any way.
  2. Because of this, liberals and leftists cannot accept basic goods such as beauty and strength
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.

Society ought to be organized around promoting concepts such as beauty and strength, and in particular ought to be organized around doing so instead of pursuing "nihilistic" goods such as hedonistic pleasure or preference satisfaction

Beauty and strength ought to be applauded, recognized, encouraged and emulated. Obviously such secondary virtues can not be the rock on which society rests, they ought though be cherished and glorified. Not attacked out of spite or envy.

Likewise, the idea that liberals and leftists are against the entire concept of beauty is just... rather laughable? Every leftist artist who argues that the western conception of beauty ignores the values of underrepresented minorities/cultures/etc. is inherently accepting the concept of beauty as something to value, and merely arguing that what our society believes to be beautiful is not actually beautiful. You can believe they're wrong if you want, but they clearly have, and value, a standard of beauty. It just happens to not necessarily be the same standard of it as yours.

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.

The nihilism that you identify as an inherent characteristic of "liberalism" and "leftism" is in fact a quality of urbanity and urban communities, an observation that was noted as early as the 20th century by Simmel and so forth. More rural leftists, up to and including the USSR, were just as disdainful of what they saw as the nihilistic decadence of Western society as you are, if not moreso, to the point where the CIA promoted modern art specifically as an example of the creativity and artistic diversity of developed Western society which the authoritarian communists, obsessed with promoting the classically beautiful image of Socialist Realism, could not understand. The immense concentration of the city undermines communitarian values and traditional hierarchies as people lose strong interpersonal connections and attachments to their neighbors and their superiors, the fast-paced nature of city life naturally prioritizes the material over the spiritual and reduces the power of traditional values, and the spread of access to knowledge encourages people to seek answers in human works rather than the supernatural and undermines the wonder of things such as beauty and belief.



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.

You may very well defeat leftism, a transient political movement that is currently extremely politically weak, but the unending march of urbanity and urbanization brought about by technological progress that rewards concentrations of people, economies of scale, and the widespread distribution of knowledge and communications is inevitable. You may defeat your present enemies, but the way of life that you cherish--the communitarian, traditional values and stable hierarchies of rurality--is already dead. Your children will die sad, creaking deaths as they watch the last vestiges of the world they knew slip away forever.

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.
 
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OliverCromwell

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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.

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?
 
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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
I'd argue that even if no leftist has ever explicitly argued this, this is the end result of a leftist values led society, that is even innate differences such as muscle mass should be repressed or discouraged. A collective idea becoming if you will.

Curious you bring up race, it is increasingly common the right to accept innate and permanent racial differences. Which make a multi racial society impossible.

The distinction here is we consider these differences legitimate and warranting preservation.

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.
Ah okay I think we have a misunderstanding here. I am not merely arguing inequality is good, I am arguing it should be enforced and maintained. I don't want certain segments of the world's population to talk to me as if they were my equal. Take of that what you will.

Was responding to Meerkat/YOC/Heterosexual there, although it's good to know that your self-proclaimed faith is as hypocritical as it appeared!
Eh whatever.

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.
Alright to put my position in more outlaid terms.

1. Virtue(speaking generally not a specific school of ethics) is good. It makes for good rulers.
2. It makes for good rulers because virtuous qualities such as heroism, compassion, intelligence, far sightedness allow one to rule their kingdom/country/bathhouse party well. A venal self interested ruler, one who is cowardly, greedy, or stupid is a bad ruler because these are bad qualities which produce bad effects.
3. Virtues should be inculcated, taught and preserved. Lack of virtue should be punished and condemned for the security of the people and the state. To use Rome as a cliche example-compare the civic duty of the republican elite in the Second Punic War, the steadfastness and resolve to continue the war in spite of devastating losses, vs. say the late empire's handling of the attempted reinvasion of Carthage and the venal betrayal of Majorian by Ricimer. Good virtuous leadership matters. Many of the leaders of the late empire-the usurper emperors, italian aristocracy and the like were by no means stupid, but their self interest outweighed any loyalty to Romanitas. This is not just Gibbon speaking, but was noted at the time.
4. Virtue and Intelligence are better for ruling a country or society than say wealth. Any fat aristocrat can buy an assembly, this doesn't make for good rulers. A quality of seeking wealth-greed is of less value than far sighted discipline. And this applies to everyone. Discipline is better than avarice.
5. Compassion without the tempering of proper perspective and far sightedness is counter productive. Help the man on the road and by all means be a good Samaritan, but don't let the man take advantage of you because he manipulates your guilt and soft heart. Intelligence, raw intelligence is obviously better than compassion. So I'm glad we agree here.
6. In conclusion virtue and intelligence are both qualities of value. And both confer benefits to rule. Which other qualities do not bring.

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!
Okay I can see your reasoning here, mass decision making prevents the few from making spectacularly bad calls. Human minds in the aggregate no doubt increase the computing power. But look at any riot, silly fad, or other mass phenomenon and if you tell me that they are good things, then I will simply not be able take you seriously. The masses are easily distracted, especially with what appeals to their base impulses and the "shiny things monkey like" affect. Which is of course reinforced by social pressure and the evening effects you cite. The masses like say Obama as a president not because of his policies but because he's "cool". (Believe me I was exposed to this in 2008). Why is Obama cool, because everyone(meaning everyone in my social circle says because people in their circles do, etc...) Same with any celebrity or politician, or anything-the masses do not make the decision of its merit on its grounds, but whether or not the peers do. In cities, this is especially pernicious, as the dense environments and close contact degrades human capacity for serious thought and turns him into something more closely resembling cattle, following the other bovines down the arranged path of the slaughter house. You see this with protest rallies, spates of criminality and the like. Also literally a Ray Kurzweil style AI or God is a much better decision maker, or less grandiosely, a few elite of exceptional intelligence, and individual reasoning ability.

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?

Have I proposed some new form of government? I would think both a combination of genetic engineering, and a mix of educational methods designed to weed out the merely capable and focus on the truly respectable would be set aside to be trained to rule.

Social measures would be put in place to clamp down on nepotism and the promotion of the idiot nephew. These measures would be implemented via either carefully structured mechanisms of state or outright non human maintenance.

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!"
They don't have a standard at all though? They want there to be no standards, an ugly gutter rat is as beautiful as Helen of Troy. They want us to say this as if we believed it, anything else would be an expression and perpetuation of "harmful" norms.

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.
You mean rootless deracinated cosmopolitans. Who have no concept of beauty worth the name. Modern art is degenerate, and of no value. Except to speculators who treat as a commodity the way they do the houses and the stock market.

Yes indeed, urban reconstruction is an example of urban death!
And? They prevented their cities from growing too large or lasting too long.

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.
My dude, you are being disingenuous. Urbanites can and have been militarily defeated. That is obviously what I am referring to.

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?
We reactionaries are a pessimistic lot. Hope is not something that has graced us since the French Revolution if not before. That is hope within the confines of this world. But enjoy your dirty cities, even when ecological tipping points are broken and the masses fight over water and scraps of bread. As they have since the days of Sumer. And will the last day in human history.
 

Yinko

Well-known member
I've never denied that leftists don't want to invent arbitrary new values for determining which group gets to rule over other groups!
Ah, so it's a petty competition over which set of arbitrary valuations is superior. Typically, there are two ways to solve such a matter; appeal to history and appeal to violence. I feel that I would win such a competition as the weight of history leans right, but unfortunately it appears that current events aspire to sort things out through the latter method.
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.
Hm, here I always thought I was urban working class. Seeing as how I live in a city and don't make particularly much money. Perhaps it is not class that you oppose but rather disagreeing opinions. But, then that would mean that you are ideologically totalitarian. Or are you evading a repost by murdering innocent verbage?
 
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As if the urban working class actually held any sort of class conscious agency in the real world and not in the fantasizing of middle class online Trotskyites.

Much less any sort of global solidarity.
 

OliverCromwell

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I'd argue that even if no leftist has ever explicitly argued this, this is the end result of a leftist values led society, that is even innate differences such as muscle mass should be repressed or discouraged. A collective idea becoming if you will.

This is an incredibly extraordinary claim and you have done nothing to justify it whatsoever. I strongly doubt that you can either.

Curious you bring up race, it is increasingly common the right to accept innate and permanent racial differences. Which make a multi racial society impossible.

Unfortunately such claims are soundly discredited by modern science, so I shall sadly have to content myself to merely being superior to you on my individual basis rather than also being superior to you by virtue of my membership in the high-IQ East Asian race and yours in the mediocre-IQ Caucasian one, as Sailor et al.'s spurious "research" suggests.

Ah okay I think we have a misunderstanding here. I am not merely arguing inequality is good, I am arguing it should be enforced and maintained. I don't want certain segments of the world's population to talk to me as if they were my equal. Take of that what you will.

See, you say this, but at the same time you seem manifestly unhappy with the fact that I refuse to talk to you as though you are my equal, despite the fact that by the very own "objective" qualities which you claim to establish human superiority, I am superior to you by virtue of my superior intelligence/IQ. You likewise seemed incredibly offended when I asserted that the superior northern population of the United States--characterized by its higher rates of wealth generation, educational achievement, technological and productive development, civic participation and virtue, and almost every other meaningful quality by which defenders of the concept of cultural superiority attempt to establish some populations such as that of the West as superior to others--ought to enforce and maintain its superiority against the clearly inferior Southern one, characterized by idleness, rent-seeking, and low education (and especially offended at the statement that the North should have done so in the 1860s, when this difference in culture between the two was at its most pronounced!). It seems to me less that you want "inequality" based on some pseudo-objective measurement of ability maintained, as you repeatedly proclaim to, but that you instead want an inequality that specifically places you and people like you on the top of the spectrum for whatever arbitrary reasons that can justify it, ones which quite frequently are outright at odds with the "objective" measurements of superiority which you have asserted so far.

Alright to put my position in more outlaid terms.

1. Virtue(speaking generally not a specific school of ethics) is good. It makes for good rulers.
2. It makes for good rulers because virtuous qualities such as heroism, compassion, intelligence, far sightedness allow one to rule their kingdom/country/bathhouse party well. A venal self interested ruler, one who is cowardly, greedy, or stupid is a bad ruler because these are bad qualities which produce bad effects.
3. Virtues should be inculcated, taught and preserved. Lack of virtue should be punished and condemned for the security of the people and the state. To use Rome as a cliche example-compare the civic duty of the republican elite in the Second Punic War, the steadfastness and resolve to continue the war in spite of devastating losses, vs. say the late empire's handling of the attempted reinvasion of Carthage and the venal betrayal of Majorian by Ricimer. Good virtuous leadership matters. Many of the leaders of the late empire-the usurper emperors, italian aristocracy and the like were by no means stupid, but their self interest outweighed any loyalty to Romanitas. This is not just Gibbon speaking, but was noted at the time.
4. Virtue and Intelligence are better for ruling a country or society than say wealth. Any fat aristocrat can buy an assembly, this doesn't make for good rulers. A quality of seeking wealth-greed is of less value than far sighted discipline. And this applies to everyone. Discipline is better than avarice.
5. Compassion without the tempering of proper perspective and far sightedness is counter productive. Help the man on the road and by all means be a good Samaritan, but don't let the man take advantage of you because he manipulates your guilt and soft heart. Intelligence, raw intelligence is obviously better than compassion. So I'm glad we agree here.
6. In conclusion virtue and intelligence are both qualities of value. And both confer benefits to rule. Which other qualities do not bring.

So... you have discovered the basic insight that virtue and prosocial behavior are indeed good things? Congratulations, you have attained the social intelligence of a toddler. Such basic insight (albeit with different language and very different codifications of "virtue" and what prosocial behavior might entail) underlies the belief system of almost every person, and every set of politics on earth. It is not even remotely inherent to the particular sort of reactionary politics you espouse.

Okay I can see your reasoning here, mass decision making prevents the few from making spectacularly bad calls. Human minds in the aggregate no doubt increase the computing power. But look at any riot, silly fad, or other mass phenomenon and if you tell me that they are good things, then I will simply not be able take you seriously. The masses are easily distracted, especially with what appeals to their base impulses and the "shiny things monkey like" affect. Which is of course reinforced by social pressure and the evening effects you cite. The masses like say Obama as a president not because of his policies but because he's "cool". (Believe me I was exposed to this in 2008). Why is Obama cool, because everyone(meaning everyone in my social circle says because people in their circles do, etc...) Same with any celebrity or politician, or anything-the masses do not make the decision of its merit on its grounds, but whether or not the peers do.

...and? People sometimes believe stupid things. Sometimes, lots of people believe in a stupid thing. Sometimes, that stupid thing is peer pressure. That says nothing one way or another as to whether vote-taking among a large pool of diverse weak learners produces less variance and generally superior outcomes to a single learner, which still remains not only true but in fact mathematically proven as an inevitable consequence of information science, and you have done nothing to disprove this.

Moreover, you realize that the things that you accuse "the masses" of here is just as true for a smaller group of decisionmakers as it is for the masses as a whole, correct? Fads and peer pressure can just as much exist among a small group of 100 aristocrats as they can among a large group of a million citizens. The only difference is that, again, a particular fad establishing itself at random and/or through peer pressure is much more likely to take a hold of 51 aristocrats than 500,001 citizens, and thus far more likely to dominate the decisionmaking of an aristocracy as it is the decisionmaking of a democratic body.

In cities, this is especially pernicious, as the dense environments and close contact degrades human capacity for serious thought and turns him into something more closely resembling cattle, following the other bovines down the arranged path of the slaughter house. You see this with protest rallies, spates of criminality and the like.

This is literally the opposite of true--city-dwellers have both higher levels of intelligence and a greater-propensity for long-term planning,

Also literally a Ray Kurzweil style AI or God is a much better decision maker, or less grandiosely, a few elite of exceptional intelligence, and individual reasoning ability.

Have I proposed some new form of government? I would think both a combination of genetic engineering, and a mix of educational methods designed to weed out the merely capable and focus on the truly respectable would be set aside to be trained to rule.

Social measures would be put in place to clamp down on nepotism and the promotion of the idiot nephew. These measures would be implemented via either carefully structured mechanisms of state or outright non human maintenance.

Ah, I see, so rather than discussing the world that actually exists and systems of government which are actually attainable we are discussing the Kurzweillian fantasyland of AI gods which most AI researchers don't find credible and that which even the most generous and favorable estimates place as being decades away if it iseven possible at all? And reactionaries accuse leftists of living in a fantasy world, lol.

W.R.T an elite of exceptional intelligence and individual reasoning ability, you answered literally none of my questions about how such an elite could actually be brought about and put in control--beyond a few vacuous notions of "education" or "punishments for nepotism" which are so vague as to be completely meaningless and which seem to ignore the fact that almost many self-proclaimed intellectual elites (again, the Chinese scholar-officials notably among them, the authorities of the Catholic Church being another) had mechanisms for educating virtue and punishing nepotism and suspiciously none of them ever seemed to work, in large part given that such things are administered by precisely the same elite that they're meant to restrain in the first place--so the idea of actually identifing and empowering such an elite is just as much of a fantasy as Kurzweil's AI dreams, really. Even more of one, in fact, since Kurzweil can at least produce arguments for why his superintelligences will actually exist, regardless of how good they are.

As an aside, have you not given any thought to the nature and general political beliefs of the sort of people who work on developing the genetic engineering and AI which you seem to pin your hopes for a reactionary political system on, and what sort of system they would be inclined to work to bring about with the tools that they are building? Hint: I'm one of them.
APA PsycNet
They don't have a standard at all though? They want there to be no standards, an ugly gutter rat is as beautiful as Helen of Troy. They want us to say this as if we believed it, anything else would be an expression and perpetuation of "harmful" norms.

Really now? Because leftists seem to have very clear ideas of many things which they consider to be ugly. Toxic masculinity, to pick an obvious example that it seems difficult to dispute that most leftists obviously find unattractive and "ugly". That rather seems to suggest that they have standards, which simply happen to be different from yours no?
APA PsycNet
You mean rootless deracinated cosmopolitans. Who have no concept of beauty worth the name. Modern art is degenerate, and of no value. Except to speculators who treat as a commodity the way they do the houses and the stock market.

Assertions, assertions, again with the assertions. Modern art is degenerated and of no value? Prove it. Something of the urban conception of beauty is "unworthy of the name"? Prove it. You've provided no reason to believe that this is actually the case, only whined about how these conceptions are different than yours and therefore bad.

And? They prevented their cities from growing too large or lasting too long.

Dude, read the article. There are 7 different theories listed for why this house-burning occurred. None of them involve any desire to prevent the growth or continuation of cities, and nowhere in the article is it suggested that this practice prevented or retarded the growth of cities in size or population, merely that they allowed for the periodic reconstruction of the city's buildings.
APA PsycNet
My dude, you are being disingenuous. Urbanites can and have been militarily defeated. That is obviously what I am referring to.

Yes, and some Luddites managed to break the spinning jennies in some English factories so obviously it was possible for them to have reversed industrialization. In some particular favorable conditions, any population is able to win temporary triumph over any other population. As I admit, it's perfectly possible to envision one country preventing urbanization within its borders for some temporary period of time. That says nothing about whether the trend of greater urbanization and concentration of wealth and population in the cities is reversible overall. Urbanization and technological growth--much like the onset of agriculture in early human populations--are irresistable precisely because they confer competitive advantages on those who adopt them which will inevitably result in those populations outcompeting the others which have refused to. Cambodia killed all its urbanites, and was almost immediately taken over by Vietnam which had embraced them instead. Even if you somehow succeed in the United States, your story will turn out all the same.

Ah, so it's a petty competition over which set of arbitrary valuations is superior. Typically, there are two ways to solve such a matter; appeal to history and appeal to violence. I feel that I would win such a competition as the weight of history leans right, but unfortunately it appears that current events aspire to sort things out through the latter method.

The triumph of agricultural civilization over hunter gatherers and pastorialists had little to do with appeal to history nor with one great, intentional violent struggle, but everything to do with the inevitable competative advantages conveyed by greater productive efficiency that agriculturalization entailed. The triumph of the urban over the rural will be very much the same.

Hm, here I always thought I was urban working class. Seeing as how I live in a city and don't make particularly much money. Perhaps it is not class that you oppose but rather disagreeing opinions. But, then that would mean that you are ideologically totalitarian. Or are you evading a repost by murdering innocent verbage?

And you absolutely deserve to be given equal power and rights as any other member of the class! I imagine most of them will disagree with you, but you can hardly call losing a vote ideologically totalitarian now, can you?
 
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This is an incredibly extraordinary claim and you have done nothing to justify it whatsoever. I strongly doubt that you can either.
Consider it observational intuition. Even the slightest of inequality will lead to injustice in leftist utopia. Mark is stronger(slightly) than Steve which means he can beat Steve in an arm wrestling contest and this oppresses Steve and reinforces reactionary ideology of people being better than other people. Thankfully no such madness has yet existed in the real world, though it is not difficult to imagine.




Unfortunately such claims are soundly discredited by modern science, so I shall sadly have to content myself to merely being superior to you on my individual basis rather than also being superior to you by virtue of my membership in the high-IQ East Asian race and yours in the mediocre-IQ Caucasian one, as Sailor et al.'s spurious "research" suggests.
Ah yes, I recall the scientific American article that argued the issue of race and intelligence ought not be investigated due to its political nature. (It’s been scrubbed from the internet now). Science especially social science is just so much waxing to back the ideology of our current ruling class.


See, you say this, but at the same time you seem manifestly unhappy with the fact that I refuse to talk to you as though you are my equal, despite the fact that by the very own "objective" qualities which you claim to establish human superiority, I am superior to you by virtue of my superior intelligence/IQ. You likewise seemed incredibly offended when I asserted that the superior northern population of the United States--characterized by its higher rates of wealth generation, educational achievement, technological and productive development, civic participation and virtue, and almost every other meaningful quality by which defenders of the concept of cultural superiority attempt to establish some populations such as that of the West as superior to others--ought to enforce and maintain its superiority against the clearly inferior Southern one, characterized by idleness, rent-seeking, and low education (and especially offended at the statement that the North should have done so in the 1860s, when this difference in culture between the two was at its most pronounced!). It seems to me less that you want "inequality" based on some pseudo-objective measurement of ability maintained, as you repeatedly proclaim to, but that you instead want an inequality that specifically places you and people like you on the top of the spectrum for whatever arbitrary reasons that can justify it, ones which quite frequently are outright at odds with the "objective" measurements of superiority which you have asserted so far.
I didn’t care honestly? Your patronizing and blubbery tone is noticeable though you seem to have misread me in thinking I was offended or surprised by it. When you’ve had the sort of wild insults thrown at you that I have, what your doing merely rolls off the back. As for culture, obviously it’s a complex matter. Northern “culture” does not exist if you mean WASP Protestantism, or Puritanism. It’s subsumed in modern mass culture with the predilections of both Wall Street and the Bronx. It’s not culture, it’s a seething mass of corporate owned lemmings. As for IQ, Asian IQ is no doubt good, and I have no doubt your are a very intelligent man. As it is, IQ measurements do have their limitations, such as the autistic savant who can do quantum mechanics but can’t tie his own shoe laces, or I dunno a lack of imagination. I can’t confirm your IQ is as high as you say it is, and even so it doesn’t really interest me. And before you say I’m moving the goal posts, note I have never said IQ is the be all, end all of intelligence. Intelligence is multi dimensional and IQ measures arguably only certain dimensions of it, presuming you are a psych major I would hope you know that. And what of it? I want a system that places me and mine at the top. That may or may not be attainable or realistic, but we aren’t discussing what is attainable. In the end, it all comes down to who is swinging the stick. And whose face is being bashed in.


So... you have discovered the basic insight that virtue and prosocial behavior are indeed good things? Congratulations, you have attained the social intelligence of a toddler. Such basic insight (albeit with different language and very different codifications of "virtue" and what prosocial behavior might entail) underlies the belief system of almost every person, and every set of politics on earth. It is not even remotely inherent to the particular sort of reactionary politics you espouse.
I would politely disagree. If you want evidence, go to twitter. But I’m sure you’ll tell me with a straight face that’s collective intelligence or some shit and not the literal shit for brains of the masses spilled out on public display.
Ah, I see, so rather than discussing the world that actually exists and systems of government which are actually attainable we are discussing the Kurzweillian fantasyland of AI gods which most AI researchers don't find credible and that which even the most generous and favorable estimates place as being decades away if it iseven possible at all? And reactionaries accuse leftists of living in a fantasy world, lol.

W.R.T an elite of exceptional intelligence and individual reasoning ability, you answered literally none of my questions about how such an elite could actually be brought about and put in control--beyond a few vacuous notions of "education" or "punishments for nepotism" which are so vague as to be completely meaningless and which seem to ignore the fact that almost many self-proclaimed intellectual elites (again, the Chinese scholar-officials notably among them, the authorities of the Catholic Church being another) had mechanisms for educating virtue and punishing nepotism and suspiciously none of them ever seemed to work, in large part given that such things are administered by precisely the same elite that they're meant to restrain in the first place--so the idea of actually identifing and empowering such an elite is just as much of a fantasy as Kurzweil's AI dreams, really. Even more of one, in fact, since Kurzweil can at least produce arguments for why his superintelligences will actually exist, regardless of how good they are.

As an aside, have you not given any thought to the nature and general political beliefs of the sort of people who work on developing the genetic engineering and AI which you seem to pin your hopes for a reactionary political system on, and what sort of system they would be inclined to work to bring about with the tools that they are building? Hint: I'm one of them.
APA PsycNet

I was referring specifically as to how my system would remain stable in the long run. As it is both the examples you cite, the Catholic Church and Confucian exams were long lasting institutions which despite their many failings, did do a lot of the work I imagine being needed. The former still exists today. I want a system that will last. A system composed of benevolent aristocrats who are immortal and held in check by an AI god is no doubt a fantasy. But if implemented could last until the sun consumed the earth. Or the last star died. Democracies do not have long shelf lives. And that is born out by history.


And I’m so glad to hear it! I’m sure your doing great work.




Really now? Because leftists seem to have very clear ideas of many things which they consider to be ugly. Toxic masculinity, to pick an obvious example that it seems difficult to dispute that most leftists obviously find unattractive and "ugly". That rather seems to suggest that they have standards, which simply happen to be different from yours no?
Toxic masculinity aka normal historically healthy and necessary male behavior is ugly in a feminized post industrial society. The sun rises in the East. Let’s use women as an example. The left wants me to look at a five hundred pound Walmart shopper with a nose ring and under threat of ostracism or censure I must say “she’s beautiful” “she’s more beautiful than the super model whose beauty is some oppressive standard or shit” I’m supposed to actually believe this, really society is gaslighted into being told a deer is actually a horse. Its a lie, and a lie people like you want us to swallow.



Assertions, assertions, again with the assertions. Modern art is degenerated and of no value? Prove it. Something of the urban conception of beauty is "unworthy of the name"? Prove it. You've provided no reason to believe that this is actually the case, only whined about how these conceptions are different than yours and therefore bad
Your seriously going to argue art with me? Your going to argue that someone creating a figurine the Virgin Mary in literal shit is good art? Or a bucket of paint spilled on a side walk. Or a building that looks like a prison that magically came to life and is depressed and has low self esteem(see brutalist architecture). None of this has any value. Or well it does in a negative sense that too much exposure to it and promotion of it is socially and morally corrosive. It’s the obliteration of the ideal of symmetry, and proportions, and everything else which makes for good art.




Dude, read the article. There are 7 different theories listed for why this house-burning occurred. None of them involve any desire to prevent the growth or continuation of cities, and nowhere in the article is it suggested that this practice prevented or retarded the growth of cities in size or population, merely that they allowed for the periodic reconstruction of the city's buildings.
And? They burned the city. They controlled its growth. They were not concrete apes, that lived in its strictures but masters of it. Urbanites are fundamentally creatures of dependency, born of powers they can only walk in the shade of.


This is literally the opposite of true--city-dwellers have both higher levels of intelligence and a greater-propensity for long-term planning,
Which cities were these? What culture was this? When was this study conducted? Where in the cities was it conducted? Dude, you seem to think I’m a yokel who has never visited the big town. I definitely have, and while anecdotes are of limited value, I can say with confidence this does not jive with what I actually observed. A rural home owner needs to think five or ten years ahead, while an urban renter often can’t afford to think past next month’s dues to the land lord. As for certain kinds of intelligence, urban environments do likely develop say spatial intelligence and the like-its been observed in birds in comparison to their rural cousins, of the same species. Sure I’d probably struggle to remember things like a London cab driver. So what? It’s environmental adaptation. Asking a fish to fly doesn’t say anything about the fish’s innate ability. Again, the APA is a compromised publication. Given it changes the DSM on the grounds of whatever the current zeitgeist/madness is. Like when it declared homosexuality was no longer a mental disorder due to a targeted political campaign in the 1970s. Your vaunted publications are not free of blind spots, ideological, peer driven or otherwise. So citing them does not impress me. If I’m head of the APA all I need to do is create an environment where I dunno-saying child adult sex is actually natural and not bad and unhealthy is bully and censure anyone who disagrees, and voila I get the DSM changed! What great science! Truly a neutral apolitical arbiter. Not driven in the slightest by funding considerations, attention from the press, perverse publish or perish incentives. No all truth!



Yes, and some Luddites managed to break the spinning jennies in some English factories so obviously it was possible for them to have reversed industrialization. In some particular favorable conditions, any population is able to win temporary triumph over any other population. As I admit, it's perfectly possible to envision one country preventing urbanization within its borders for some temporary period of time. That says nothing about whether the trend of greater urbanization and concentration of wealth and population in the cities is reversible overall. Urbanization and technological growth--much like the onset of agriculture in early human populations--are irresistable precisely because they confer competitive advantages on those who adopt them which will inevitably result in those populations outcompeting the others which have refused to. Cambodia killed all its urbanites, and was almost immediately taken over by Vietnam which had embraced them instead. Even if you somehow succeed in the United States, your story will turn out all the same.
Have you payed attention in the slightest to what has happened in the past five months? Many companies have realized they can do remote work. Advances in self driving cars, drone delivery, VR and the like will render the need for urbanization less paramount. We don’t even need teleporters and replicators. Or the fact that cities are death traps in the event of pandemics.

Urbanization is driven by an interlocking process-the concentration of capital and labor. People move to the cities because jobs, and thus they are invested in for profit/tax revenue which brings money which means more jobs. This is a process that can be broken by either the destruction of capital, the lack of need for labor, or dispersal shocks.

I find it amazing a socialist like yourself(correct me I’m wrong here) is cheering neoliberalism, environmental devastation and the creation of a global elite that does actually rule on the basis of money. Maybe you think this will create the conditions for a working class revolution, but I doubt it. Without rural areas, you will sow your own destruction. When the water is poisoned, when the population growth is simply so high the excess heat produced makes cities 15 degrees warmer than other areas, or the mental health problems, or the social conflict. Or literally all the other negative consequences of urbanization which the left has discussed for the past thirty years.

Enjoy your brown water and bread lines.

Because that’s what you get in urbania.
 
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OliverCromwell

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Consider it observational intuition. Even the slightest of inequality will lead to injustice in leftist utopia. Mark is stronger(slightly) than Steve which means he can beat Steve in an arm wrestling contest and this oppresses Steve and reinforces reactionary ideology of people being better than other people. Thankfully no such madness has yet existed in the real world, though it is not difficult to imagine.

Yes, and it's also not difficult to imagine you stripping naked, smearing feces all over your face, and going out into the street and dancing the chicken dance until you die of exhaustion. That doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. Find me one leftist who believes--or whose writing even implies--that two people having a difference in physical strength, or some similarly small difference of objectively measurable ability that neither leftists nor rightists dispute is accurately measured, is somehow oppressive. Show me even one passage that you can logically draw this conclusion from. I'm waiting.

As for culture, obviously it’s a complex matter. Northern “culture” does not exist if you mean WASP Protestantism, or Puritanism. It’s subsumed in modern mass culture with the predilections of both Wall Street and the Bronx. It’s not culture, it’s a seething mass of corporate owned lemmings.

All the same, it remains true that by any measurement of cultural superiority such as productivity, crime, education, etc. that right-wingers promote, a place like New England (whatever culture you wish to attribute to it) is manifestly superior to a place like the US south. Moreover, this was even more true in 1860. And yet when I pointed out that this was true in 1860, you wined like a little snowflake bitch. So tell me again that you believe in objective measurements of superiority and want others not to address you as an equal based on them.

As for IQ, Asian IQ is no doubt good, and I have no doubt your are a very intelligent man. As it is, IQ measurements do have their limitations, such as the autistic savant who can do quantum mechanics but can’t tie his own shoe laces, or I dunno a lack of imagination. I can’t confirm your IQ is as high as you say it is, and even so it doesn’t really interest me. And before you say I’m moving the goal posts, note I have never said IQ is the be all, end all of intelligence. Intelligence is multi dimensional and IQ measures arguably only certain dimensions of it, presuming you are a psych major I would hope you know that.

Really now? Because you suggested earlier that people on the right were starting to accept innate racial differences, which I'm quite current on as well, and this is broadly based on the suggestion of people like Steve Sailor and his so-called "Human Biodiversity" cohort whose work focuses almost entirely on measurements such as IQ and criminality, and which likewise suggests the superiority of Asians to whites. They at least claim to have science to back up their claims. It's garbage science with an overt racist motive, but they're at least not just pulling it out of their ass. Where's your evidence? If you're making such a radically different claim than the mainstream of people on your side, let alone the scientific consensus as a whole, do you have even a single fact to back that up? How exactly can you prove that there are racial differences in whatever other multi-dimensional attributes you cite?

And what of it? I want a system that places me and mine at the top. That may or may not be attainable or realistic, but we aren’t discussing what is attainable. In the end, it all comes down to who is swinging the stick. And whose face is being bashed in.

I mean, yeah, precisely. My whole point here is that your notions of your own particular culture being objectively superior to others by some objective standard of measurement is bollocks, and in reality you, much like everyone else, simply wish to bring about a world where your own group is dominant and groups which are enemies of yours are oppressed. I don't disagree! As Schmitt noted, the friend-enemy distinction is the core of politics. You are my enemy and I am yours. I wish to oppress you, and you wish to oppress me. The difference is that you, inevitably, will lose, even if I do not win.

I would politely disagree. If you want evidence, go to twitter. But I’m sure you’ll tell me with a straight face that’s collective intelligence or some shit and not the literal shit for brains of the masses spilled out on public display.

Really now? Find me five tweets that say that prosocial behavior is bad. Back up your claims with even the slightest bit of evidence. I'm waiting.

I was referring specifically as to how my system would remain stable in the long run. As it is both the examples you cite, the Catholic Church and Confucian exams were long lasting institutions which despite their many failings, did do a lot of the work I imagine being needed. The former still exists today. I want a system that will last. A system composed of benevolent aristocrats who are immortal and held in check by an AI god is no doubt a fantasy. But if implemented could last until the sun consumed the earth. Or the last star died. Democracies do not have long shelf lives. And that is born out by history.

Yes, and both systems were quickly outcompeted by cognitively superior more democratic ones when technological conditions allowed for the formation of the latter, which is why the scholar-officials are all dead and why the Catholic Church hasn't held temporal power for centuries. See, this is precisely my point--you claim to promote a system ruled by hyperintelligent and virtuous superior men, and yet the system you are really defending, the system that such an aristocracy inevitably turns out to be, is simply the feudal aristocracy of societies like medieval Europe and China. And unlike your imaginary ubermensch aristocracy, these systems possessed the very real flaws of aristocracy--nepotism, inefficiency, rent-seeking, institutional capture, and an endless deluge of profoundly mediocre "aristocrats" whose position was acquired through little more than inherited privilege--that directly led to them being outcompeted by liberal democracy once the later emerged. Why will the same not happen to whatever new government you erect?

Toxic masculinity aka normal historically healthy and necessary male behavior is ugly in a feminized post industrial society. The sun rises in the East. Let’s use women as an example. The left wants me to look at a five hundred pound Walmart shopper with a nose ring and under threat of ostracism or censure I must say “she’s beautiful” “she’s more beautiful than the super model whose beauty is some oppressive standard or shit” I’m supposed to actually believe this, really society is gaslighted into being told a deer is actually a horse. Its a lie, and a lie people like you want us to swallow.

You're missing the point, bruh. I am making no judgement whatsoever as to what is actually beautiful or ugly--my whole point is that this is in fact a ridiculous argument to have--merely pointing out that leftists clearly have an idea of what is beautiful and what is ugly, and therefore that your notion that they somehow wish to abolish the very concept of beauty and ugliness is utterly absurd. You can disagree about the particulars as much as you want. That, as with many other things, is simply a conflict between competing cultures, which among other things possess competing aesthetic values, one which you happen to be losing. All my point was is that you don't occupy some sort of special position where only you and people like you believe in beauty and ugliness as a concept, and instead compete to assert the correctness of your particular aesthetic values of beauty over others just like every other group on earth.

Your seriously going to argue art with me? Your going to argue that someone creating a figurine the Virgin Mary in literal shit is good art? Or a bucket of paint spilled on a side walk. Or a building that looks like a prison that magically came to life and is depressed and has low self esteem(see brutalist architecture). None of this has any value. Or well it does in a negative sense that too much exposure to it and promotion of it is socially and morally corrosive. It’s the obliteration of the ideal of symmetry, and proportions, and everything else which makes for good art.

Yes! Brutalism is a brilliant architectural style, and far superior to whatever ornamentationshit you lot trot out. Why should symmetry deterine what is beautiful? Why should proportions determine what is beautiful? You've provided no argument to that effect one way or another. Once more, you're simply whining like a little bitch because other people don't like the things that you do.

And? They burned the city. They controlled its growth. They were not concrete apes, that lived in its strictures but masters of it. Urbanites are fundamentally creatures of dependency, born of powers they can only walk in the shade of.

People haven't lost the ability to demolish buildings and construct new ones lol, idk what you're smoking. If that weren't the case then I wouldn't be living next to like 4 different construction projects on a daily basis.

Which cities were these? What culture was this? When was this study conducted? Where in the cities was it conducted? Dude, you seem to think I’m a yokel who has never visited the big town. I definitely have, and while anecdotes are of limited value, I can say with confidence this does not jive with what I actually observed. A rural home owner needs to think five or ten years ahead, while an urban renter often can’t afford to think past next month’s dues to the land lord. As for certain kinds of intelligence, urban environments do likely develop say spatial intelligence and the like-its been observed in birds in comparison to their rural cousins, of the same species. Sure I’d probably struggle to remember things like a London cab driver. So what? It’s environmental adaptation. Asking a fish to fly doesn’t say anything about the fish’s innate ability. Again, the APA is a compromised publication. Given it changes the DSM on the grounds of whatever the current zeitgeist/madness is. Like when it declared homosexuality was no longer a mental disorder due to a targeted political campaign in the 1970s. Your vaunted publications are not free of blind spots, ideological, peer driven or otherwise. So citing them does not impress me. If I’m head of the APA all I need to do is create an environment where I dunno-saying child adult sex is actually natural and not bad and unhealthy is bully and censure anyone who disagrees, and voila I get the DSM changed! What great science! Truly a neutral apolitical arbiter. Not driven in the slightest by funding considerations, attention from the press, perverse publish or perish incentives. No all truth!

Ah yes, I recall the scientific American article that argued the issue of race and intelligence ought not be investigated due to its political nature. (It’s been scrubbed from the internet now). Science especially social science is just so much waxing to back the ideology of our current ruling class.

Aha! You fool! You utter cretin! You've fallen for one of my ingenious traps!

The study I cited about intelligence was from 1959, long before any of this so-called infiltration of the APA occurred. In fact, at that point, the general attitude of the APA towards race, gender, sexuality, etc. differences was far closer to yours than to mine--this was a time when most people in the APA did believe that white people were more intelligent than black people, men were more intelligent than women, etc. In fact, the methodologies used by the study I'm citing here are more or less the same methodologies used by proponents of so-called "human biodiversity", which most scientists now consider discredited. So which is it? Are these methods invalid, in which case we ought to throw out both this notion of urban-rural IQ differences along with those associated with race and gender? Or are they not, in which case you are a stupid low-IQ rural peasant whose only proper role in life is to serve the metropole?

Yes, and when I worked retail in a rural county all the people I encountered were significantly more short-sighted than most of the people I regularly encounter in the city. See, I can throw out anecdotes based on an uninformative personal experience too! But whereas both you and I have anecdotes, only I have data. You're free to browse Dr. Sng's research as you wish--if you can find any methodological error, I'd be very interested to know!

Have you payed attention in the slightest to what has happened in the past five months? Many companies have realized they can do remote work. Advances in self driving cars, drone delivery, VR and the like will render the need for urbanization less paramount. We don’t even need teleporters and replicators. Or the fact that cities are death traps in the event of pandemics.

Urbanization is driven by an interlocking process-the concentration of capital and labor. People move to the cities because jobs, and thus they are invested in for profit/tax revenue which brings money which means more jobs. This is a process that can be broken by either the destruction of capital, the lack of need for labor, or dispersal shocks.

I find it amazing a socialist like yourself(correct me I’m wrong here) is cheering neoliberalism, environmental devastation and the creation of a global elite that does actually rule on the basis of money. Maybe you think this will create the conditions for a working class revolution, but I doubt it. Without rural areas, you will sow your own destruction. When the water is poisoned, when the population growth is simply so high the excess heat produced makes cities 15 degrees warmer than other areas, or the mental health problems, or the social conflict. Or literally all the other negative consequences of urbanization which the left has discussed for the past thirty years.

Enjoy your brown water and bread lines.

Because that’s what you get in urbania.
Work from home isn't exactly a new innovation, lol. I worked from home for a third of the time on my last internship. It's been perfectly possible in the tech industry for years now, and yet curiously the tech industry is one of the most, rather than least, urbanized industries in the country, and only continues to be so even as telecommute technology is developed and actually used. The economic advantage of urbanization goes far beyond having an office--it's based around how the concentration of knowledge industries, research, universities, etc. in dense urban areas allows for faster exchange of ideas--and therefore innovation--as well as giving companies easy access to a wide pool of nearby talent which is easy to recruit. None of that will disappear if people start telecommuting more or ordering drone delivery.

You seem to misunderstand where I'm coming from--my assertion is not that my side will win, but that your side will lose. Urbanization is an inevitable process driven by technological change--there's no sense feeling one way or another about it, beyond being thankful that such a change will be to the benefit of my particular class of high-tech professional workers. My argument is not that socialism will win, although I obviously hope that it will--it may well be the case that we will fail and the world will suffer for it under the rule of the current plutocratic elite. My argument is simply that you will inevitably lose, regardless of whether or not we do. If the leftists succeed, you will be crushed by a democratic, environemtally friendly urbanity with livable conditions for all its residents. If we do not, you will be crushed by a plutocratic, profoundly unequal urbanity which may well have many of the problems you fear. But you will be crushed either way. I am fighting for the sake of the new age. You are fighting--futility--to preserve the old against a change which is beyond the power of men to halt.
 
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Yes, and it's also not difficult to imagine you stripping naked, smearing feces all over your face, and going out into the street and dancing the chicken dance until you die of exhaustion. That doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. Find me one leftist who believes--or whose writing even implies--that two people having a difference in physical strength, or some similarly small difference of objectively measurable ability that neither leftists nor rightists dispute is accurately measured, is somehow oppressive. Show me even one passage that you can logically draw this conclusion from. I'm waiting.
Literally all the literature on ableism?

As for your other points, I’m tired and bored of this pointless debate.

But because I’m a man of generosity, I’ll give quick replies.

Crime in the south is very dependent on where you are. Comparing to say the Bronx or New York State is disingenuous.

No you want to subvert classical western beauty in return for no beauty at all.

The infiltration of the APA was ongoing since I dunno the forties? Or earlier? Dr, Spock, and all. Really the APA has been a bad egg always. And it’s influence 100% negative.

“professional workers”-yes tell me about that when your replaced by an Indian on a visa. Literally the cattle of global capital. Traded out for cheaper cuts of beef. And you think your going to be doing the bashing. Your triumphalism is comical.

“fear”-dude there current day problems. That get worse every year.

I think I have you figured out, your a socialist Whig who believes in the eternal magical force of progress but are smart enough to not believe the “Triumph of the Proletariat is Inevitable!”

There is no moral arc of history. No magic force of progress. The same events that lead to urbanization can be reversed. Either through events in nature(asteroid impacts and the like) or human resolve.

As for democracies “out competing” aristocracies, did we read the same history? Democracies were not implemented in the modern sense in most of the world until the 20th century. Democracy is clearly failing today, else Hong Kong would have inspired rebellion in China. So much for the evolutionary benefits of democracy. Aristocracy, dictatorship, monarchy, all endured in many ways to this day.

I’ll grant you that urbanization is a powerful force, and you may be feel you can surf it, but like any wave, you’ll be sunk as well. Professional technicians like yourself are increasingly disposable to global capital. It can be reversed though, merely with sufficient application of will. Saying it’s natural bespeaks I think a lack of confidence in your socialist project, if man can’t control his own existence then he is a beast indeed.

As for rural life, it has endured. It endured the first cities in Sumer, it endured the industrial revolution and it will endure today. I don’t actually want to drive all the urbanites out of their apartments at bayonet point, make them do farm labor with their bare hands and then machine gun them and dump them in ditches. I’m a man of decency, unlike you. Urbanization merely means I’ll have to endure driving into the city to buy shit or put up with noise while on vacation in a hotel. You may consider that a “victory” in that I have to partake in your world and deal with your people on a regular basis, which is entirely fine.

It’s clear this debate is futile, your here to troll, I have neither the sympathy nor patience to respond in good faith. And

Why do I bother? Boredom and an overly combative energy.

I have no further interest in this virtual mudslinging.

I’m done here.
 
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