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The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile an

The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile and member of NAMBLA. I'm not sure we want to pine for the return of those days.

barry-cotter 4y ago
You like the ideology that won. That’s fine. Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires. Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees. Everyone agrees because of coalition politics where some people won and others were told to bend the knee or get out.
- fatbird 4y ago
  Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires. This is a childish sort of cynicism that's really about nursing your feeling of grievance with promises of justified retribution to come. I actually have a philosophy degree, and studied in detail the political philosophers of the last five centuries. Politics is not about crushing your enemies, it's about figuring out durable institutions and social pacts that maximize freedom and human flourishing while sufficiently limiting our self-destructive tendencies. It's about figuring out how to live together. If it comforts you to believe that "my victory" is as cynically appreciated as your own, you're doing yourself a disfavour. Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees I don't. But I also don't fool myself that the sort of big tent moral relativism that allows for indivisible differences to coexist side-by-side is some sort of victory, or commitment to rights for all. It's just a matter of using high-minded rhetoric to avoid hard choices in who you're willing offend.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    If your education in history is so concentrated in political philosophy I suggest broadening it. You might see that the idea of justified retribution or usually illusory and always cold comfort. If you think maximizing freedom and social flourishing has been a pressing concern you might look to the Mongols, Confucian philosophy or any of the great Muslim empires. Human flourishing they believed in but in an extremely different form to anyone who’s an intellectual descendant of Enlightenment thinkers. Flourishing their way. Freedom, certainly not. There’s a right way to be and we should follow it. If your first and second paragraphs are consistent I don’t see how. Should you feel like continuing this my email is in my profile.
  - rendall 4y ago
    >> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley... > This is a childish sort of cynicism ... I do note that you engaged in the rhetorical trick of smearing those with whom you disagree by associating the entire movement with the literal worst person possible, which is itself childish cynicism. A: "As a sufferer of a severe anxiety disorder, the prospect of a trip to India was to me as scary and unlikely as a flight to Mars." B: "Whoa! Wow! White supremacy much?" In fact, rhetorically, this is how that side gains any victory at all. Certainly not through principled advocacy and reasoned debate.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile and member of NAMBLA. I'm not sure we want to pine for the return of those days. This is on the face of it a bit silly. It's confusing a bad thing with the entire scene, which is not appropriate. Hundreds of years ago we thought "don't tar everyone with the same brush" would be a nice clear way to correct silly thinking like this; I bet we never thought it would still be happening today.

barry-cotter 4y ago

You like the ideology that won. That’s fine. Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires. Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees. Everyone agrees because of coalition politics where some people won and others were told to bend the knee or get out.

fatbird 4y ago
Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires. This is a childish sort of cynicism that's really about nursing your feeling of grievance with promises of justified retribution to come. I actually have a philosophy degree, and studied in detail the political philosophers of the last five centuries. Politics is not about crushing your enemies, it's about figuring out durable institutions and social pacts that maximize freedom and human flourishing while sufficiently limiting our self-destructive tendencies. It's about figuring out how to live together. If it comforts you to believe that "my victory" is as cynically appreciated as your own, you're doing yourself a disfavour. Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees I don't. But I also don't fool myself that the sort of big tent moral relativism that allows for indivisible differences to coexist side-by-side is some sort of victory, or commitment to rights for all. It's just a matter of using high-minded rhetoric to avoid hard choices in who you're willing offend.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  If your education in history is so concentrated in political philosophy I suggest broadening it. You might see that the idea of justified retribution or usually illusory and always cold comfort. If you think maximizing freedom and social flourishing has been a pressing concern you might look to the Mongols, Confucian philosophy or any of the great Muslim empires. Human flourishing they believed in but in an extremely different form to anyone who’s an intellectual descendant of Enlightenment thinkers. Flourishing their way. Freedom, certainly not. There’s a right way to be and we should follow it. If your first and second paragraphs are consistent I don’t see how. Should you feel like continuing this my email is in my profile.
- rendall 4y ago
  >> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley... > This is a childish sort of cynicism ... I do note that you engaged in the rhetorical trick of smearing those with whom you disagree by associating the entire movement with the literal worst person possible, which is itself childish cynicism. A: "As a sufferer of a severe anxiety disorder, the prospect of a trip to India was to me as scary and unlikely as a flight to Mars." B: "Whoa! Wow! White supremacy much?" In fact, rhetorically, this is how that side gains any victory at all. Certainly not through principled advocacy and reasoned debate.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile and member of NAMBLA. I'm not sure we want to pine for the return of those days. This is on the face of it a bit silly. It's confusing a bad thing with the entire scene, which is not appropriate. Hundreds of years ago we thought "don't tar everyone with the same brush" would be a nice clear way to correct silly thinking like this; I bet we never thought it would still be happening today.