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I hope more people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope. Part of the problem though is that we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of w

• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > I hope more left-leaning people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope. They already spent the last few decades objecting to Joseph McCarthy. Denunciation of his evil, and celebration of his downfall to the "Have you no shame?" speech, was an element of modern leftist canon. If they couldn't recognize what was happening every time they mentioned his name, they never will.
  • bigstrat2003 3y ago
    I think you are unfortunately correct, although I don't think it's accurate to frame this as an issue which only affects the left (though maybe that isn't what you meant). It's clear that humans simply aren't capable of learning to not go on witch hunts. Even with all of the time we spent teaching our children about Salem, Joseph McCarthy, and the like, it goes out of people's heads the instant they encounter a cause they think is righteous and important enough. At this point it seems clear that witch hunts are hardwired into too many human brains to be able to educate people out of it. We will need to figure out how to structure society in such a way that the tendency does as little damage as we can manage.
    • thaumasiotes 3y ago
      I don't think the behavior is something specific to the left. What is specific to the left is making opposition to witch hunts an explicit element of their catechism. Thus engaging in witch hunts reflects more poorly on them.
• schneems 3y ago
  > we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews First past the poll voting with primaries encourages (forces) politicians to go to the extremes. Ranked choice voting can reduce extremism. It’s also cheaper for tax payers as it eliminates expensive and wildly discriminatory/disenfranchising runoff elections.
  • Freedom2 3y ago
    Many Americans already don't understand progressive tax as a concept. How can we realistically expect them to understand ranked choice voting?
    • tacon 3y ago
      Proof by example: Alaska already does ranked choice voting https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
      • gnicholas 3y ago
        True, but that doesn't actually establish that voters understand how it works. IIRC, they've only had it for a short time, so there's not much of a track record to establish that voters are casting votes in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and desires.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • ACow_Adonis 3y ago
      The same way other nations do?
      • foofie 3y ago
        It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't. If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you will get accusations of vote fraud and election tampering.
• roenxi 3y ago
  Well, 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy. The issue here, more precisely, is that without something to push against the US is inculcating ideas into the next generation of leaders that make ex-Soviets think "wait a second, this looks like home!". It isn't a slope, this is literally rebuilding the dangerous parts of authoritarian bureaucracy - people who can't think and are then given unearned and easily abusable power over others by an objectively dumb system. The US is already there (as I like to point out, about half the US economy is government spending these days - that isn't a free market, it is some sort of mixed open-command economy); it is only a question of how far the ripples reach.
  • ls612 3y ago
    Slippery slope is only a fallacy if you assume a certain form of certainty or determinism. Otherwise it is just an older term referring to Bayesian updating of priors.
  • psd1 3y ago
    I support your railing against bureaucracy, but question your assertion that a specific quantity of public spending is bad. Firstly, government spending does not imply greater bureaucracy; compare and contrast healthcare in America with pretty much anywhere else. Secondly, fiscal policy should be dynamic and reactive to economic conditions. I don't pretend to understand Keynes, but I believe he established that principle beyond question. The Austrian school may have challenged it, but their axioms did not survive the light of day.
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      Keynes has been discredited in recent years, it's odd that you think he's established anything. The Austrians were proven right and recent monetary policy reflects their view - you don't see much discussion of Keynes anymore. If you don't understand Keynes maybe that's why you don't realise that? To recap Keynes: his core idea was countercyclical monetary policy, i.e. to issue debt (print money) when times are bad and pay down debt (recall money) when times are good. It sounds good but the Austrians pointed out that there would be two problems in practice: 1. Give governments a nice sounding justification for money printing and they will do it to excess, creating inflation. The Austrians were right: governments cited Keynes when printing money in a recession, and then the "emergency measures" would conveniently never end. The part where you pay down the debt in good times by running a primary surplus would never be respected. 2. Keynes misunderstood the nature and cause of recessions. Recessions occur when there has been widespread misallocation of resources, usually due to some collective delusion or state mismanagement. The groupthink breaks and people realize that their investments are duds. Credit is withdrawn, investments cease and there's a giant sucking sound as people lose their jobs whilst those who still have money try to figure out what to do next. Keynes posited that recessions are quasi-natural disasters that just inexplicably happen, and that the fix is for the government to spend money to balance them out. But this isn't the case and so his fix just makes things worse. It may appear to end the recession if all you look at is a handful statistics, but the underlying misallocation still occurred and when governments step in desperate to create employment - any employment - they misallocate resources still further. Like someone taking stimulants to try and delay the end of the party, it works for a while but they get more and more messed up. There's lots of activity but not much is actually useful. Governments don't care though, because all they're trying to do is keep people digging proverbial holes and filling them back up again. You can drown the signals of a recession by misallocating resources still further, but it's not a good idea. Keynesianism has worked out in the past 15 years exactly as the Austrians always said it would, and now Austrian economics is back in vogue. The 2008 recession led to the ZIRP years of easy money that never ended, even when the economy was booming. Government debt climbed endlessly. Inflation span out of control and now interest rates have been hiked repeatedly even though the economy was trashed by lockdowns - exactly the moment Keynes said to do the opposite.
• js8 3y ago
  While I largely agree with what you said, about > there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism I don't think that's the case, actually. I suspect the tendency actually comes from liberalism, i.e. notion of individual freedom. If we are to give people individual freedom, then we are going to be neglectful of the power they attain as groups. This is easily observable in the economic sphere, where the rich people are getting richer under liberalism, and as you note, we are oblivious to the plight of losers. Another problem that you note is that the conflict is treated as two sides. In my personal political philosophy, there are 4 basic (sets of) moral values: 1. Value of human being itself (this gives ideology of humanism, rejection of which can be considered to be extremist), i.e. rejecting harm to humans, accepting humans as they are, forgiveness 2. Value of individual freedom (this gives ideology of liberalism, which is inherently neither left or right, usually considered "center"), i.e. most individual rights, rights to freely socially organize, ability to act independently to society 3. Value of human equality (this gives ideology of progresivism/socialism, which is the core of the "left"), i.e. this includes democracy, the idea we should collectively all have equal rights in society, we should all have fair access to economic resources, also strong moral universalism (also in this context, this also includes DEI) 4. Value of culture and our shared past (this gives ideology of conservativism, which is the core of the "right"), i.e. we should preserve existing (social) structures and culture through institutions, we should have property ownership, and we should have authorities in place to preserve the potentially harmful changes in society It's pretty easy to see that all these values are logically independent, people do however largely share all of them. However, each person sees the world from a slightly different perspective on each issue, moral dilemmas tend to occur where there is a disagreement. For example, the tendency of society towards centralization and authoritarianism is just an expression of value (4). It happens more or less independently of values (2) or (3) (neither of them really values time, unlike (4)), although the proponents of (2), being by nature more permissive, oblivious to any social institutions and not defining the desired end result, tends to allow it to happen much faster (this is also called paradox of tolerance). So while I agree when you write: > It seems the war between camps means that anyone trying to promote a more subtle or intricate message is shunned or ignored by both sides. I don't think there are just 2 sides, there are at least 4 big sides, see above; however, treating problems as 2-sided is often practical in terms of acquiring political power. I do however take slight issue with: > But the first challenge would be for the left to acknowledge the need for freedom and the right to acknowledge the need for average people to exist without fighting for scraps. You're saying, people who value (3) need to acknowledge (2) and vice versa. I agree with this idea (that was actually why I developed the above philosophy, to understand these contradictions), but the practical reality is different than what you wish. Most of the left is more accepting of liberalism than liberals are accepting of the left (historically, at the French revolution, the liberal ideas were part of the left, while the right was only values of (4), like there should exist nobility). And in fact, the Western societies are now so heavily tilted towards values of (2) that the centrists proudly think they can ignore (3) completely. In fact, ignoring (3) by liberals is dangerous and historically led to concentration of power and fascism (which is an extreme of (4)), and that's what we observe (that's why anybody who wants power goes after (3) sooner before they go after (2) - often by falsely adopting (3) as an ideological goal, because individuals are harmless, it's the ability of groups to organize through shared value of (3) that is a dangerous antidote to concentrated power). Most leftists can also easily see through what DEI is being promoted honestly, as being true to values of (3), and what is just an ideological BS (and whitewashing) designed to attain power. I mean, if corporations (true for many academic institutions as well) really wanted DEI, they would promote more democracy in the workplace (and transformed the corporations into cooperatives, for example). Claudine Gay affair is a nice practical example of these institutions (and their masters) showing true colors.
• edmundsauto 3y ago
  > So I have to conclude that this is not just a left problem In America, the conservative movement drove fealty to ideals and invented cancel culture. It wasn’t leftists insisting our money trust god or that small children pledge allegiance. The left adopted it because people were committing suicide because of the systematic hate and discrimination. The religious right wing invented it because their feelings were hurt if everyone didn’t believe in their same sky fairy and preferred economic religion.
  • bloqs 3y ago
    Specifically it's reactionary to American conformism
• lr1970 3y ago
  > So there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism. But on the other side, total denial of any systemic social problems that results in increasing inequality leaving more and more people fighting for scraps as monopoly powers increase. Basically, from both ends of the spectrum here comes the tendency of concentrating and monopolizing power politically or economically. We are losing agency as individuals actors in the society.
• slowmovintarget 3y ago
  I don't know. I recall listening to conservative thinkers discuss the left. I'm not talking about alt-right or hard-right bozos, I'm talking about Thomas Sowell and Bill Bennett. They consistently used words like "opponent" or "opposition" when describing fellow Americans with differing worldviews. Then they dive into the ideas. While I don't recall, for example, President Obama or President Clinton saying things like "enemy" or "evil" when describing fellow citizens, we do have candidates and mainstream press using much harsher and more negative terms. I started watching a video from the self-avowed "left" discussing what the left ought to know about the right (pushed by the algorithm). The expert being interviewed was a professor of some sort, and in his very first answer he used the phrase "fight the enemy" and "understand the enemy" when describing how to deal with half the population of fellow citizens who disagreed with his ideology. Hillary Clinton's memorable "basket of deplorables" is another. Don't get me wrong. Ten years ago, you wouldn't hear that kind of rhetoric from conservatives. But conservatism has been swallowed by alt-right Trump-style populism. I try to tune out the rants coming from the far right, so I imagine there are plenty of examples coming from awful sources. But this "enemy" rhetoric should never come out of the mouth of anyone respectable when speaking of their own countrymen or countrywomen. I think I agree with you in that it is "not just a left problem" but there seems to have been a predominance of this "kill the enemy" rhetoric coming more from the left for many decades, than from the right. Part of the reason for this is that so many of the leftist playbooks like Rules for Radicals or Marxist strategy papers from Engels include "destroying the enemy" (encompassing eliminating morality, eliminating traditional family units, and fomenting violent revolt). Playbooks on the right, traditionally, have included understanding the rhetoric of the left, analyzing its ideas in terms of economics and personal freedom, and using debating tactics to "win" arguments. I have to conclude that this is not just a "both sides" problem, but that one side spends a lot more of its energy on pushing toward the extremes.