[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Ben Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org> wrote:


> However, I come from many generations of leftists, even plenty of
> Marxists among my grandparents etc. (though my parents abandoned any
> form of strict Marxism in the late 70s on observing the reality of the
> Soviet Union, they remain fairly leftist...)
>

### Ben, you are not one of the elite leftists I referred to in my two
posts (the original one went into more details, if you are interested you
can find it in the archives). You may be however a cultural leftist,
somebody raised in an atmosphere filled with leftist idiom who did not
become a part of the political structure of leftism.

Leftism is the major non-theistic (godless) civic religion in America. Just
like in any organized religion, there is a split between the faithful and
the clergy, and the more dominant the church, the more drastic the split.
Those interested in clawing their way up end up in clergy, those who have
other interests (like AI research), don't.
-----------

>
> To me leftism is about compassion and fairness more than anything
> else.   It's about believing the social contract should, normatively,
> include a responsibility for society to provide everyone some minimal
> level of help and opportunity.   It's about feeling it's morally wrong
> for a small elite, with power and wealth that is mainly inherited, to
> control nearly everything and take most of the goodies for themselves.
>

### An accurate portrayal of beautiful beliefs....

---------

>
> Anyway I have a low estimate of the ultimate value to be gotten from
> in-depth discussion of politics on this list.  I just wanted to
> briefly speak out against your caricature of leftist politics...
>

### .... but the Pelosis, the Obamas, the Hoffas and other hierarchs are
cut from a different cloth, and my words are no caricature.

-------------------

>
> -- Piketty's recent master work "Capital in the 21st Century" (which
> is flawed in ignoring exponential technological acceleration, but is
> an excellent, thoroughly data-driven summary of the economics of the
> last few hundred years.  Turns out the data is way more supportive of
> leftist than rightist thinking...)
>

### They want to do the same thing they always did when money is tight. At
least this time they promise not send anybody to the Gulag or the gas
chamber. I guess this is progress.
---------------------

>
> Rafal, it goes w/o saying I have great respect for your scientific
> work and your general stature as a creative, proactive human being.
> But I can't agree w/ your view on leftism.  IMO in a world without
> leftist activiism throughout the 20th century, but with other
> political factors roughly the same, the Western nations would now be
> far more extremely owned by small egocentric elites, and science and
> tech progress would be much less than they have been, as well as total
> human happiness being much lower.   (Of course, I can also envision
> other systems of gov't far better than anything current left or right
> politicos imagine.  But that's a different story.) .... Similarly,
> going forward toward Singularity, if we subtracted leftist
> thinking/attitudes and left other sociopolitical factors roughly the
> same, we'd end up with a pre-Singularity period in which small selfish
> elites simply owned everything and manipulated the Singularity path
> for their own personal good.  This would lead to all sorts of dangers
> and problems beyond the intrinsic moral aspects of uncompassion and
> unfairness...
>

 ### We could spend a long time trying to vivisect this body politic,
probably to little benefit. But, let me just tell you that from my
far-outsider's perch, a Che T-shirt does not look cool at all. It's too
splattered.

Rafal
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