[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 129, Issue 19

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 8:29 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> :
>
>>   You don't seem to understand liberalism.
>>>
>>
>> ### Hey, didn't we just talk about "leftism", not "liberalism"?
>>
>> I understand "liberalism" very well, including the meandering of its
>> meaning throughout the history of memetic warfare between various
>> intellectual subspecies of humans.
>>
>> In the end, liberalism as it was understood when the term was coined, is
>> about humility, not "social services" or even good intentions. It'a pity
>> that humility seems to have gone out of fashion a long time ago.
>>
>> Rafal
>>  ​I can't find humility anywhere in liberalism:  civil rights, equality,
>> free elections and so on, but not humility.
>>
>
### Your understanding of today's leftism is very telling: You explicitly
disavow humility as a political virtue. Earlier you mentioned loot ("social
services"), and yes, loot is one of the quintessential issues of leftism.
You mention "equality" - forced equality of outcomes is part and parcel of
leftism, since bringing others down is a power trip like no other. Now you
mention, of all things, "free elections" as a defining feature of leftism!
Do you realize how it sounds? It's silly - most leftists were and are
against free elections, they always have them rigged if they can, from
Albania, to the Soviet Union, to the United States 2012 presidential
elections. And yet you underhandedly imply that non-leftists are against
democracy, which is a way of putting others beyond the pale ("othering" - a
key social control strategy).

But, talking about humility - back in the day when liberalism meant the
opposite of what it means today, liberals stood for the idea that good
people should humbly accept our differences. That it is wrong to force
obedience, to dictate faith, control trade, to use power - so they opposed
kings and tyrants, separated church and state, opposed royal monopolies and
guilds. A liberal humbly eschews the use of power over others, a liberal
lives and lets live, even very different lives. But that was a long time
ago. Now we have SWAT teams going after unpasteurized cheese makers.

Are you sure you want put yourself on that team?

Rafal

BTW, I am against elections, free or otherwise but that's a different story.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140619/c0e4b0a9/attachment.html>