[ExI] Political Relativism (was very informative)

Tue Dec 29 23:40:30 UTC 2020

But you are correct in that extremists on both
the left and the right become increasingly authoritarian the further
out on their respective wings they are.

Stuart LaForge     Can I get a link to that data, please?  bill w

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 4:48 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Quoting Anton Sherwood:
>
> > On 2020-12-27 11:10, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:
> >> Thanks for that billw. ?What Prager describes as liberal is something I
> >> have always thought of as libertarian.? I agree with everything he said
> >> in that video.? You and I are liberals.
> >
> > So freedom of movement across artificial boundaries is not a libertarian
> > position?  Well, not gonna argue that here.
>
> National borders are no more artificial than property lines.
> Regulating traffic across national borders can be justified by similar
> arguments as having locks on your doors and fences around your yard.
> Living in denial that the collective has its own needs, its own will
> to survive, and its own emergent intelligence is a very poor defense
> of ones individual liberties against it. Statism and nationalism are
> emergent properties of the rule of law. While the ideal of political
> anarchy is that people will grow wise enough someday to self-regulate,
> the harsh reality is that without strict enforcement by governments,
> laws are ineffectual, and natural ape hierarchies manifested by feudal
> warlords and continual violence emerge.
>
> All of the greatest accomplishments of civilization from the Great
> Pyramid, to the Roman Coliseum, to the Apollo Moon Landings were
> collective achievements. That the few individuals that led these
> endeavors profited more than the rest is evidence that individualism
> and collectivism are interdependent on one another and can co-exist.
> Insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock for the purely selfish
> motives of a great many individuals, but once they form, they have
> their own properties not manifested by any individuals.
>
> > Prager also seems to have a statist post-hoc concept of nationalism.
> > Historically, nationalism was about what we might call "natural"
> > nations, tied by culture and kinship, as OPPOSED to the borders created
> > by wars and the homogenizing campaigns of authoritarian regimes
> > beginning with radical republican France.
> > Would Prager say "Basque nationalism", for example, is a contradiction
> > in terms because there is no sovereign Basque state?
>
> But war is a major mechanism by which culture and kinship evolve over
> time. The main reason there is such a thing as France today is that
> Caesar's legionnaires lumped the Vasconi tribe (ancestral Basques) in
> with the rest of the Gauls and taught them Latin in exchange for their
> tributes of gold, land, and daughters. What allowed a bunch of
> primitive and disparate tribes to form a nation was ultimately their
> fear and hatred of outside oppression. It is telling that when Basque
> nationalism started to re-emerge fairly recently, they took to writing
> their native language in the Latin alphabet of their ancient oppressors.
>
> Note that none of this should be construed as support for Prager's
> views. I am trying to make a larger point which is that any and all
> political positions are necessarily selfish, subjective, and relative.
> However, this is not to say that political positions that are reached
> from rational arguments are invalid. Instead I am taking a major cue
> from physics here in saying that contradictory and even diametrically
> opposed political views can both be completely correct from the point
> of view of the people espousing them.
>
> Consider what I call the "Parable of the Proton":
>
> Once upon a time there was proton who was drifting along at some
> velocity parallel to a wire from left to right. The proton was happily
> in its own inertial reference frame and so was the wire when suddenly,
> someone closed a switch and an electrical current started flowing
> through the wire. Now there were electrons drifting through the wire
> in the same direction and at roughly the same speed as the proton and
> the proton found itself shoved away from the wire by an invisible force.
>
> When questioned about the nature of the force, the wire and the proton
> gave contradictory answers. The wire, for its part, insisted that the
> proton was shoved by a magnetic force which arose as a result of the
> charged proton moving through the magnetic field that happened to be
> induced by the wire minding its own business and conducting an
> electrical current.
>
> The proton however vehemently disagreed. The proton insisted that it
> had been shoved away from the wire by the purely electrical force of
> the positively charged protons in the wire. The proton explained that
> what had happened was that when the circuit was closed and the
> electrons started moving along the wire with nearly the same velocity
> as the proton, it caused the electrons in the wire to move much slower
> relative to the lone proton than the positively charged protons in the
> wire. Therefore the wire's length was contracted relative to the
> outside proton and the co-moving electrons causing a local
> overabundance of positive charge which shoved the proton away from its
> rightful trajectory.
>
> Therefore it is concluded that even in a domain as rigorous, factual,
> and objective as physics, two observers can attribute different
> contradictory causes to the same event and yet both be absolutely
> correct based on their respective frames of reference.
>
> If there is that much wiggle room for subjectivity in physics, what
> hope do we have for finding objective truth in something as sloppy as
> politics? Is it any wonder then when asked what is the cause of
> poverty amongst black people you might get differing answers from
> either side of the political spectrum as well from the black people
> themselves?
>
> > If right and left have any consistent meaning in different places and
> > times, I'd say the right seeks social stability and the left seeks
> > social equality.  Both of these terms are quite broad, and within them
> > the emphasis varies pretty widely.  But neither has much room for
> > anti-authoritarianism, for a contractual social order as against a
> > status order.
>
> Right and left are meaningless without specifying a frame of
> reference. A conservative Christian living in the U.S. might have very
> different, perhaps even incompatible, values than a conservative
> Muslim living in Iran. But you are correct in that extremists on both
> the left and the right become increasingly authoritarian the further
> out on their respective wings they are.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
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