[ExI] political disaster was: request to tone down politics

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Mon Jun 6 08:45:47 UTC 2016


On Jun 6, 2016, at 1:23 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 11:40 AM, Gregory Lewis <gjlewis37 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Even if you’re pretty whiggish (which I’m guessing Extropians generally are…) about social progress over time, you might still want to have some institutional conservatism as we approximate better and better the ‘right system’, as newer innovations are more likely to be error.
>> 
> ### Are we whiggish? Hmm, dunno. How many supporters of the Corn Laws do we have here? Supporters of the Prohibition?
> 
> Weird people fit into the usual mass-market political classifications like a square peg in a round hole. I dimly remember this list doing some surveys of members, maybe 15 years ago. There seemed to be a lot of trying not to fit in too well.
> 
> I feel allergic to almost all that is contained currently under the label "liberal" in the US. But then, I am hardly illiberal either, and you couldn't call me a conservative. Such a confusion of terms, ever creeping classifiers.

I thought Spike meant whiggish in the generic sense of viewing progress as inevitable. You know, the Whig view of history -- rather than the Whig Party.

I view myself as in the tradition that traces back to the classical liberals, the original Left. And that has nothing to do with modern conservatism, which traces itself back to thinkers like Burke and Carlisle.

 Regards,

Dan
  See my latest Kindle book, "The Late Mr. Gurlitt," at:
http://mybook.to/Gurlitt
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