I used to be attracted to Anarchism/Anarcho-Syndicalism because of its theoretical flexibility (as what initially seemed to me at least) and rejection of Stalinism. I thought the message was "yes Soviet & Chinese Communism led to economic development, but authoritarian regimes aren't acceptable" so one of the key questions I've always been interested in was democratic economic development, examples around the world of how to pursue both at once. And in the process, I realized, that a lot of these types of socialists say "yes to economic development, no to authoritarianism & capitalist exploitation", but don't actually care all that much about economic development, or at least they're not willing to see that the local-oriented projects they're inspired by won't realistically be used as models to improve the lives of most people living on this planet.

I had a discussion with this fellow anarchist once about my admiration for what the Costa Ricans achieved, they abolished their military and developed a welfare-state capitalist industrialization in combination with worker cooperatives. Not perfect, but we could learn from it as a model for third world development that's preferable to other countries who pursued economic growth in very authoritarian ways. And I was met with dismissal. And that's when I abandoned anarchism.

I guess I call myself a socialist. The term "Democratic Socialism" sounds nice. Others on the Left accuse that label of being just an ambitious form of social democracy, but that's definitely not right with respect to my views.

I think both of us may be among the small minority on the Left on de-growth here. But I also think that not only is de-growth undesirable, but that it is politically impossible, hard to make sense of it as a policy agenda anyone is crafting and implementing. When I look at what is described when people mean by de-growth, you have to practically abolish the global market economy as it is to make it happen. They should just admit that is what they're advocating instead of being roundabout. (I personally think it's delusional to think it'll take only a few decades to get to socialism, we have to start off with deeper structural reforms of global capitalism. Whether you believe in revolutions or not, it's the kind of goal that takes a lot of steps. Not a current solution to climate change.)

Perhaps you are right about that then. I think anyone who spends a little time engaged with politics can point out a myriad of things what politics is about. Kind of like a group of elementary school students raising their hands and listing things one by one when the teacher asks what they think a word means. Well politics is about figuring out policy that works. It's about protesting against government and big business. It's about doing what you can to help your community. It's about electing the least worst politicians and holding them accountable. It's about educating the public about the truth. It's about transforming society into something better. Of course the things I've listed is contingent on my view of the world and how it works, but I find it hard to imagine that someone engaged with politics to some depth but with a different world view wouldn't also list a similar myriad of things.

I know I said otherwise in my previous post, but if I were to give a shot at that "what is politics" question, I would say it's about social structures and our acts to influence them.

I don't see the point of answering how to best conceptualize the categorical term referred to as politics. We all know what it means, and further insights can be broken down into additional questions such as our responsibilities within politics, how the world works and our relations to it, and so on. Politics is not about one particular thing the most as far as I can tell, and even if it was, as long as we can identify it among a myriad of things, I don't see the significance of pointing out the hierarchy of concepts.

I spend virtually all my time in the past 2 years on politics these days, in particular North Korea peace issues because that's what I've been involved in. But here are some stuff I've read that people here may be interested in:

Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas - Peter Beattie

Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom - Rob Larson

No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left - John Medhurst

Korea: Where the American Century Began - Michael Pembroke

Energy: A Human History - Richard Rhodes

A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow - Joshua Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto - Stewart Brand

Philosophy and Climate Science - Eric Winsberg (more technical than I thought)

Nonsense on Stilts 2nd Edition - Massimo Pigliucci

Yes, this is a pretty good primer on the subject and explanation:

https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-and-is-it-real/

"Before they got power, they wrote nicely, just like modern Leftists do."

Not really, have you read what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao said and did before they took power? They displayed authoritarian tendencies and methods, which btw, was taken noticed by and condemned by other Leftists before they took power.

Conservatives like to blame the victims to distract away from institutions, social organizations, or actions by powerful people. What he's saying here in the article is different. There's a difference between that kind of excuse-making and making important self-reflections that movements are going about their ways insufficiently, which btw, they are in America to my experience in activism.

I'm a defender of jargon, which can most effectively be used either sparingly or bountifully depending on the case. I think there's a clear difference between that and what the author has a problem with Peterson throwing jargon around to serve as an intellectual cache and not to illuminate actual content. Physics obviously needs its heavy use of jargon and mathematics so Einstein is understandable, and I would say much the same about Kant and Merleau-Ponty, although to a different extent. But when it comes to most things in the social world on a day to day basis, if you can make the same simple point but by saying the same thing everyone else can grasp, then you should. Otherwise you're just trying to trick people into thinking you have something much new to say.

I don't know where the author advocates for a messiah of the Left (he just says Peterson succeeded by filling a gap that the rest of the Left visibly does not fill for American consumers, that's not advocating one figure to fill the gap) and I don't know where the author says there is the absence of an alternative full blown ideology (whatever that means)

"I wonder whose psychological theories of archetypes might be ‘falsifiable’?"

My personal opinion is that there are no such psychological theories of that sort that can be falsifiable and that is part of the reason why they are scientifically suspicious.

"I think the reason he’s become popular is because he is talking values and meaning in a culture in which both are regarded with deep suspicion."

Which is what the article alluded to, and what serves as a terrible reason for liking him. (and at the end of the article, the author admits that Peterson is popular because he offers something for this void while others have not, and so simply scoffing at Peterson is insufficient)

"But having not read ‘maps of meaning’ and having no intention nor need to, I already like it a lot more than the review."

So apparently it is proper to like a book more than the review if you've never read it, I don't see the sense in that. I think the offered snippets offer suggestive bits that are sufficient to make a rational judgment on what to suspect, but I could go the Pyrrhonian route and read the whole book before I have any modicum of confidence in that judgment. I just don't think I will.

Maybe, but an article length seems to me as having to make do as introductions of what's wrong with someone's analysis.

New article on Jordan Peterson by Nathan Robinson that's thorough:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

Try this

https://www.amazon.com/Just-Arguments-Important-Western-Philosophy/dp/144433638X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1520530780&sr=8-3&keywords=philosophy+arguments

I'm skeptical of the rise of China. They're the best candidate for sure, but China has so many internal problems and the way it assimilated itself into the global economy makes them difficult to pursue indefinite growth as understood by pretty prominent China Experts (links below). It has been growing at the fastest pace in the largest scale in human history but with the consequence of extreme inequality and environmental depredation. Unless they fix their problems, they're not going to be able to handle the huge backlash if their economic growth slows down in the next few decades the way Japan did.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/05/29/book-review-will-china-dominate-the-21st-century-by-jonathan-fenby/

https://vimeo.com/158554979

I'm probably closer to moral anti-realism (they're not real in the sense that atoms and molecules are real) though I don't think that encapsulates my view. I just don't see how it provides a problem for objectivity.

I think of moral norms in a similar manner as chess rules or surgery procedures, we don't "discover" them as if they are "out there" in the world, yet they are constrained by physical circumstances, and we can discuss them in a way that doesn't defer to arbitrary human tastes.

Personally I think he should have been more careful, but I'm sympathetic to his support for free speech, which is apparently unpopular among the Left these days. If its mistaken in any form, I seriously doubt its the moral heresy worth mentioning that somehow decreases his credibility.

Yeah he has a very strict standard of supporting Free Speech. There are people who think his involvement in the affair was naive, but the whole business of him being sympathetic to the guy is ridiculous anyways. I don't see the point of talking about it unless we are to suspect that he's anti-semitic, a Jewish guy who grew up in a family passionate about Hebrew Studies and who later lived in a kibbutz. And who's a close friend of Norman Finkelstein whose parents were Holocaust Survivors and whose work was endorsed by Raul Hilberg, the father of Holocaust Studies. That's really the end of it, let me know if you want to have a serious discussion about politics.

Erik

"Some clearly do buy into the idea of American exceptionalism, but it doesn't seem nearly as pervasive as it once was."

The stronger version is less pervasive then it once was. But there's a more subtle version that's implicitly pervasive in American liberal politics.

"I appreciate attempts to distinguish between the "goodness" of America and the evil of other expansive powers like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and I think there are differences to be found in the way they use their power, but I also wouldn't completely dismiss points of convergence shared by aggressive and expansive powers as proponents of the above view are wont to do."

I would say Stalin was worse than the United States at that time, but for the rest of the Soviet Union's history in terms of external influence, the United States collectively have done much more crimes in the third world while Soviet Union's imperialism reached only around its peripheries. But internally, the Soviet Union was much worse. Nazi Germany was definitely worse than the United States. (I'm playing this game, but there's no point in talking about "goodness" and "evil" of countries. The United States government and corporations inflict so much damage because it is simply much more powerful than that of other countries. If another country switched places, it would do similar things.)

"China seems to be the consensus among educated opinion, right?"

Yes, they are most likely candidate for the next dominant power. Though there's a lot of good commentary by well respected China Experts on why they're unlikely to become the next Empire (Jonathan Fenby is one, Ho-fung Hung is another). Too many deteriorating internal problems that make their indefinite economic growth unsustainable, and there are all sorts of issues in the way they're pursuing economic growth that prevents independent development.

I agree with most of the rest of what you wrote in your post but adding some more things. If there are progressives that support Trump because they hate Hillary Clinton or favor non-intervention, I'm quite sure they're a tiny minority to the point of non-existent. Both from my personal observations and if you look at the Gallup Polls & Pew Research Center on a regular basis. Maybe you've met too many of them in your life, but I don't think they're that many.

Also Trump was never really isolationist in his rhetoric during the campaign, that's an exaggeration floating around if you don't take into account everything he said. He literally said everything across the spectrum, advocating everything from "bombing the hell out of ISIS" to speaking at AIPAC calling for expansion of settlements.

Going over Chomsky's political work is really really broad.....so here are my recommendations:

Read this book, and then the following articles (back and forth reviews of the book):

https://www.amazon.com/Chomskys-Challenge-American-Power-Critical/dp/0826519482/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520386116&sr=8-1&keywords=anthony+greco

http://newpol.org/content/greco-chomsky

http://newpol.org/content/noam-chomsky-american-power-reply-shalom

http://newpol.org/content/rejoinder-greco-chomsky

And yes, prominent people working in academia and activism take his politics very seriously (though they diverge from the mainstream) The idea that he's only well respected in linguistics and his outside political work only amounts to popular polemics is just being a silly ignoramus. He's done joint discussions and interviews with people like Yanis Varoufakis, Ha-Joon Chang, Stephen Zunes, Richard Falk, and many others.

I think SophistiCat is right when it comes to the moral arguments he's making, I'm not sympathetic to the responses he's been getting here. But politics is about doing your best to move closer to moral ideals through advocacy. Advocacy is not about making an abstract stamp of approval/disapproval, it's about considering what we should do within observed circumstances and acting to extract the maximum amount of justice possible. So there is value in trying to make appeals to understand Putin's actions in terms of Russia's geopolitical vulnerability as a result of NATO's expansion, and then attribute responsibility accordingly (and here I pretty much agree with John Mearsheimer's analysis). You can condemn his actions in the open saying that his actions were ultimately unjust, but that by itself doesn't get us anywhere.

I don't care what position he criticizes from, only that they're valid or invalid, and political perspectives don't come along an X-Axis for god's sake.

I think we should just drop the term political correctness and just call it for what it is, unwillingness to respond properly to unpopular opinions. Oh, and I do think there is such a thing as offensive speech, whatever the Right might deny. I just find it comical the idea that they never get offended, and I do think that offensive speech need to be dealt with through education instead of reacting hysterically to it. There's a way to have a nuanced take on it instead of grossly exaggerating the problem just so people could attack the Left by aiming cheap shots at low-hanging fruit.

Yeah I think that his hyper modularity that stems from his version of evolutionary psychology is false, the brain seems to functions as a highly distributed system, not like a Swiss Army knife. But that book is basically generative linguistics 101 written in an accessible manner and is wildly recommended by linguistics departments as an introduction and is far from popular junk. The thesis of his book the Blank Slate on the other hand is a strawman, none of the people he takes aim at actually espoused anything like a Blank Slate. Not Gould, and not even John Locke.

Pinker's best times was in the 90's, whatever severe disagreements one may have with him (my main beef is that he is committed to evolutionary psychology, a version which is even considered extreme among those who do, but he doesn't get into that as much until his Blank Slate). When he starts writing on politics, he becomes incredibly intellectually lazy and shallow, and the fact that he's promoting his new book through the endorsements of billionaire philanthropists and newspaper columnists instead of actual historians and social scientists shows that he's writing popular junk instead of serious scholarly work.

Here's a pretty good book review that came out recently:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/02/20/4806696.htm

My thinking is it's not just about guns, but how American Conservatives think about the notion of security in general.

"The leftover consequences on other people is unfortunate but it has nothing to do with me. I have the right to fend for myself, and we should celebrate those rights. Why should I take on risk for the misbehavior of others?"

It's not about the collective but the individual. You see this kind of rhetoric all the time when it comes to military spending and intervention, not wanting to pay taxes so others that are less fortunate can be taken care of, not wanting to let refugees in, and so on. I suspect there is some rough parallel to that which prevents communication regarding guns, there is a fundamental difference in values.

Personally I find it unpleasant to think about living in a society where everybody is encouraged to hold guns to feel secure, and if I happen to leave it at home when going to the supermarket one day, I'm supposed to feel uncomfortable about it because I'm at a disadvantage. Maybe that's just silly me.

The Gun "Debate" is like the Abortion "Debate" Everyone's heard all the arguments, and whether or not one side is more rational than the other, it's all about political muscle at this point. Liberals in America won issues like abortion and gay marriage and Conservatives won guns.

I recognize this partly as an empirical question, you can't possibly say what the best possible outcome would be for sure if you haven't tried them and observed what the effects are. My guess is that if we progress into designing better and better institutions, it'll look somewhat different from what we are currently imagining.

But you can make educated guesses based on history and nuanced judgment. Ultimately I think we have to get rid of Corporations and State Governments as they exist today and set up some sort of deliberative democratic system, and it has to be a form of global cooperation (I mentioned corporations because I don't see the economic system as completely separate from governments if we're going to talk about who decides the rules in how society is structured)

Personally I agree with Mill, but even if you don't and are singularly focused on dominating over views you disagree with, I just find odd the quick assumption that somehow banning them in ineffectual ways is going to make them hold any less influence over the public. I don't see how any of this is grounded in how people actually think. A few years ago, the South Korean military decided to "ban" a number of books they considered dangerous. Nevertheless, some of the books on the banned list shot up in sales. Because condemning something rather than educating them into that perspective makes something look so cool all of a sudden doesn't it?

Also I'm not a liberal and don't think like them, but they happen to be right once in a while, even if for different reasons. It's really irrelevant to the point I was making about actual physical consequences of what's happening in politics. That's caring about real ongoing politics and power, not some imagined set of circumstances. I don't really care what political label you tack onto it, I care about winning over people to my perspective, and the shaming tactics regularly used by liberal TV Networks and other bubbles hasn't made a dent in actually making the portion of the public worth considering give a crap.

Doubt needs grounds for justification, just like making confident claims. Just the fact that we probably got many things wrong from a position of epistemic humility doesn't justify a switch in behavior, which we can never succeed in doing so anyways so no point pretending.

I general sympathize with this article's exposition on the matter, I just don't think any amount of police training will help significantly to change the problem:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/01/the-nice-cop

I tend to think of how people act in terms of incentives, and if people in authority are positioned with too much instruments and opportunities to control others, there is going to be abuse all around. There just needs to be a better way to organize security in general.

Personally I care more about free speech as a principle and its social benefits (benefits that protect those most vulnerable, which include activists) rather than simply what the government happens to enforce. At least in our modern capitalist society, the distinction between public and private sphere tends to be blurred because private corporations is the arena in which people act and enforce a lot of rules. So understanding free speech strictly through the 1st Amendment is a related but separate concern for me from how citizens should behave in organizing their society.

I don't think the JFK Assassination really changes anything of how we understand history or the mountain of evidence of what we already know U.S. intelligence agencies has done, so even if did happen, I'm not really going to be concerned much except think that they're probably a little more shittier and bold than I thought, at least of that time period.

Sanders is consistently the most popular and respected politician in America long after the election while Hillary Clinton is dreadfully unpopular. Winning primary races is different winning the general election (polls consistently showed that Sanders had a better chance of winning against Trump than Hillary did) and the conscious of public opinion. Also the media was a big factor that kept people from properly knowing enough about Sanders and comparing him to Clinton during that period as explained here:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/where-did-the-bernie-sanders-movement-come-from-the-internet.html

You're right he's more of a social democrat than a socialist. In fact, his proposed policies were just barely fit in the category of social democrat, it's basically just what most of the 1st World already had. But he's emphasized a new language into the mainstream political consciousness, and that's the stark class differences. He's also bit more of a socialist than informed critics seem to think because he supports the Worker Cooperative movement.

Really? It makes conservatives go away? That's not what I would predict. What I would predict is that first, it would likely be that initially no one would really care if some Conservative Speaker came over and talked to a conservative audience (which they do so over internet web shows and FOX News anyways.) But once they're de-platformed, it goes on national media and there's going to be a lot of buzz. And then conservatives would all start saying "The Left doesn't want to engage with our ideas. They fear us. They fear us to the extent of denying us our 1st Amendment rights." And from the perspective of those whose political behavior is a bit undefined, or from some teenager/young adult trying to figure out for themselves what they want to believe, they'll look at that say "Hmm...the Right seems to be correct. The Left doesn't really care about our Constitutional Rights and they don't want to debate ideas." And then maybe also a Conservative Speaker who might not have gotten as big of an audience has his popularity shoot up.

It's better to think of consequences in terms of predictable social psychology and political maneuvering than some imagined consequences that arise from asserting an abstract stamp of disapproval that de-platforming supposedly brings.

Yeah, as Michael's quote captures, it's this idea of 'self-reliance' that is seen undermined by initiatives like UBI; the question of 'dependency' and the apparent correlative danger to 'freedom' is also one of the big motivators against it. I'd say that such arguments trade on incredibly thin and entirely unrealistic conceptions of freedom and individuality, but that's the general tenor of the argument against it, I think. Hannah Arendt once argued that freedom began where the concern with the necessities of life ended - a UBI would be a nice step on the way to securing something like an Arendtian freedom, which I find incredibly attractive.

The biggest danger with UBI I think isn't the idea itself: it's the fact that it can be leaned upon as a excuse to shut down other areas of public investment, and perhaps act as a spur to unnecessary privatization as well. While I do think any UBI should be leveraged to cut down on other social security initiatives, any such trade-off would need to be carefully calculated and weighed against specific circumstances. The worry is that UBI will be used as an excuse for what would amount to a public firesale. That would be awful.

I don't have the same attitudes towards replacing social security with UBI.

It is true that government handed cash has been shown for people to use it to support themselves rather than just waste it indolently. But it is also true that a program that serve as cohesive support for certain needs rather than forcing individuals to make responsible choices for themselves in allocating their resources can be much more liberating for the individual.

This is obvious for most people with regards to children (having a parent dictate the direction their children will develop rather than have them make decisions for themselves gives the children more freedom to enjoy their lives and develop their capabilities. Of course things like Tiger Parenting can be deleterious to their development and happiness, but that's a different story.) but it is also true to a large extent to human beings in general. That's one of the empirically proven arguments given for the benefits of social security (having a system behind you save funds for you automatically) and against voucher programs like charter schools (highly astute and responsible parents are required)

This is also because Social programs are designed to specifically help certain types of needs, which are deemed as a legal right (right to health, right for children to get proper schooling, right to retire comfortably) so politically, the lines are much more clear how much funds are to be allocated for each program when successfully passed. I suspect that with respect to universal basic income, there will be constant political opportunities to squander about how much income should be given, giving excuses for them to be cut and shortened, or for there to be legal barriers & requirements that citizens have to take to acquire more of their income. This happened with food stamps among other things. It's much more effective for society to dictate that certain needs need to be guaranteed directly.

That's my take on it, here's something I read recently that presents another interesting and much more technical case against UBI about how it'll potentially affect the economy.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work

P.S. Kurzgesagt has great videos, but I don't trust everything on it. From what I remember, the Basic Income video came after as a rejoinder to their videos about robots taking over jobs, which is pretty much a lousy myth.

I've been interested in Jackendoff's work, the analysis in here is something to look into.

StreetlightX — StreetlightX

Pro-Gun Culture in America is really sick is all I can say, it only makes sense to those who live here.

The best way to learn about Chomsky's work is to read in this order:

1. Quick Look at Political Views of Chomsky from his Main Wikipedia page (cites from Sperlich's & McGilvray's books)

2. Read the book Understanding Power, which is an accessible collection of interviews in which all the major claims are fully cited. You can download the annotated footnotes of the book online, because the footnotes are longer than the actual book itself.

3. Read the book Chomsky's Challenge to American Power: A Guide for the Critical Reader by Anthony Greco, followed by a critical review of it by Stephen Shalom you can find online. (you can also find a response back from Greco, and a back and forth)

4. A Current Affairs Article titled "Lessons From Chomsky" which you can find quickly through googling

Take a look at Brian Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality along with Simon May's work, especially, Nietzsche's Ethics and his War on "Morality"

Walter Kaufman's book is a very important & influential piece of scholarship, though I think most Nietzsche scholars today would recognize it's pretty out-dated and flawed, but that's honestly how a lot of Nietzsche secondary literature is. They all have flaws. It's worth reading alongside other books I would say.