you'd change your mind if you were worried about getting a job or losing one. also, corporations are heavily influenced by government and vice versa imo. power is power
Many people have financial independence because of things like rich parents, and as a hobby to stay busy spend their time online harassing people who aren't independently wealthy out of their jobs.
This isn't surprising. I knew rich kids in high school who did the same sort of asymmetric warfare on the not-as-wealth kids as a power play. I have two examples of them deliberately trying to cause car crashes (no collision or injuries occurred, thankfully) because their parents could easily afford new cars while a car crash would be economically devastating to the other kid.
So, like I said, it's not surprising to see people still doing it.
It *is* surprising to see someone think that this is a benevolent state of affairs.
This does actually seem to point to a fairly important difference between what most people regard as acceptable boycotts and unacceptable cancellation - boycotts are generally an attempt to change or influence ongoing behavior by an organization. The success criteria, such as it is, is the behavior changing, not e.g. specific named executives being fired (though I'm sure among all the boycotters you'll find some calling for that too). Cancellation seems to not care that some tweets you made 10 years ago aren't representative of your current views or behavior in either a personal or professional capacity; it's not calling for a change in your behavior at all. It's calling for you to be fired (or deplatformed, or whatever). Even in those cases where it's triggered by new/ongoing behavior, the goal never seems to be to "change the behavior" per se.
Yeah, the goal of cancelling is to pick a random example and publicly destroy them "pour encourager les autres". To be an effective deterrent, either the chance of getting caught must be very high, or the punishment must be grossly disproportionate to the crime, and cancellation is all about the latter.
It follows that:
a) Once you've been picked for cancellation, nothing you say or do can stop it anymore. That would defeat the purpose: we don't want people to think that they can engage in the bad behavior for a while and then just repent at the last moment.
b) The people chosen for cancellation won't necessarily be the most egregrious examples. You don't want to draw a bright line and tell people that they are safe as long as they don't cross that line; you want them to be afraid of even coming within a mile of the line, and to be at least a little bit nervous even when they are nowhere near it.
One of the things that came out of the discussion after the release of the Harper's Letter, was that for a bunch of people who signed it, and people who supported it, it turned out that there was a C as well, and is actually one of the big concerns, and that's not being even a mile of that bright line, and being thrown over it anyway. Having your ideas misrepresented or just straight-up lied about and then being cancelled based on that.
I think that one thing that's often missed is that being "Liberal" on these issues is often seen as being just as bad as being "Conservative". Of course that's not how it's framed....that framing would tear down the entire structure, but that's how it's coming across. Personally, I see the issue as one of kayfabe, where the Progressives are seen as the babyfaces, even if they're annoyingly so sometimes, and everybody else is the heel. If that dynamic gets broken, if it could be acknowledged that sometimes Progressives ARE the heels...either dealing with their own forms of racism/sexism/etc. or have different, more self-serving motives at play, then we can get some reciprocity into the system, which I think will set a more healthy set of norms.
That leads me to an empirical hypothesis: there is a pretty high correlation between how cogent a comment is and whether it includes the phrase ""pour encourager les autres."
I wouldn't consider this the most important difference that makes boycotting OK in some situations: if they just threatened to fire someone unless he shuts up, we'd still consider that wrong. To me, the line is that I oppose punishing people over speech, specifically where the person isn't employed for his opinions (as an opinion journalist or a politician is), and where the speech in question is off the job, or at a workplace where the expression of other political opinions is generally accepted.
This is a bit of a motte and bailey (or perhaps a weakman, depending on which side you're on), because "cancel culture" has been used to describe basically any form of attack on the right wing. Digging up old tweets to get someone fired? Cancel culture. Calling to vote out a senator in November? Cancel culture. Saying that a book is problematic without in any way suggesting that people should be fired for writing or publishing it? Cancel culture. Disqualifying a horse from the Kentucky Derby? Cancel culture.
(Calling for NFL players to get fired if they kneel during the anthem? Not cancel culture, apparently.)
It's easy to find examples of cancel culture gone too far, but it's also easy to find examples of "any speech I don't like is cancel culture."
There's a recent example of a Republican congressman recently whining about being cancelled in his book about being cancelled (Hawley I think?). What was funny was his (paraphrase) - "Go get my book about being cancelled, which they don't want you to read, available on Amazon Prime!"
Puritans were vastly fertile. 17th Century Waltham, MA had a total fertility rate of 9 per woman according to Harvard economic historian David Landes, one of the highest figures in history. There are a huge number of descendants of the Puritans spread across the northern half of the United States today.
A bunch of weird unstable repressive cult members, "super isolated" sounds like a few online communities I've had the misfortune of encountering. Just sayin'....
Couple of things. There is a difference between puritans and pilgrims. The pilgrims are the ones that sailed to America initially (in 1620). They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
The Puritans came to America later on. They were called the "puritans" because they tried to stay in England and purify the state church. That didn't work, so they eventually headed to America as it started to become more settled.
They left England in pursuit of religious freedom, and found it in Holland. They left Holland, in part, because they realized that religious freedom meant their kids might join the wrong church.
The whole Reformation was mostly like that: Breaking away from an oppressive orthodoxy so that you could start your own, different oppressive orthodoxy.
The Puritans opposed a proposal of religious freedom in England, because that would mean the freedom to be Catholic. In that case, they would rather not have it at all.
> They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
But not to respect it too much if "religious freedom" just meant "freedom for our kooky brand of religion and for building intolerable cities based on our creed".
I've seen arguments that Social Justice is a religion-- irritable comments from Jews that it's just Original Sin, and an extended analysis from John McWhorter that Social Justice is a religion, but it's worth seeing an analysis of *which* religion is being replayed,.
The argument is that it's faith-based Protestantism, which I think (possibly after it's over-simplified from its more sophisticated versions) is the essential thing is to have the right mental states and to prove them by one's public behavior.
The mental state standard can take a surprising variety of forms-- grim, misery-inducing religion, New Thought (the mind creates reality, if anything goes wrong in your life, it's because you were thinking wrong), and now Social Justice, where the tiniest vestige of possible racism must be eliminated.
I can't make sense of the claim in the article that Social Justice is nativist.
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering why self-described "leftists" would ally themselves with religious conservatives (or would that be religious reactionaries ?). Now it makes perfect sense !
This is terrifying. I might need to prepare for emigration as an option...
McWhorter's comments elsewhere on his blog about his choice of name for the book were disappointing. Punching up, punching down, it's less bad to be awful to someone if they don't have enough melanin. I thought the point of learning from the 60s and before was that it was the mindset that was the awful thing, not the choice of target. But alas, a targetist our John is.
I'm not particularly convinced, however this part :
"scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
I was tempted to answer "Amen to that !", which, considering this (Jewish ?) source and John McWhorter's blogbook would be doubly ironic !
I came to the same conclusion a few weeks ago, better late than never I guess :
At the core this is about different cultures, or as the anthropologists call them, ethnic groups. See how the term "racism" is often improperly used for group hatreds which AFAIK (?) are genetically very similar, like Irish and English (?) or (Sephardi-only ?) Jews and Arabs (both "Semites" ?)
We now know that languages spread in a way quite different from genes, and so does culture in general (memes).
(Note that the common meaning of the term ethnicity seems to have been corrupted into a synonym for "race" by racists in the mid-20th century, when the term "race" itself became unfashionable.)
A tribe is an ethnic group that is smaller than Dunbar's number.
A Nation is an ethnic group which manages to keep together thanks to (post)modern inventions like the printing press and mandatory schooling, which allows millions to share the same symbols and values.
(The German style of nationalism went deep into essentialism, and combined with the (misuse of the) new science of biology and the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles has spawned Nazism.)
An Empire is yet another kind of political entity (a much older one than a Nation), under which there are "non-core" ethnic groups that are more or less persecuted, more or less free to live their separate lives (as long as they pay taxes).
> "scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
"Country" is also a fiction. A person's country still has plenty of real associations with their health, wealth, life span, education, and more. Should we stop trying to analyze different population outcomes according to the country? Of course not, and I don't see why "race" would be any different.
Certainly race isn't very precise or directly causal, but race-based research has its place, particularly when you don't have the funds for more precise data gathering to tease out ethnicities or other factors that go into "race".
The point is, "better fiction" depends on what you're measuring and the resource cost to achieve a certain precision (time, money, etc.). You just can't make a universal claim like "nation is a better fiction than country", because other factors matter.
Finally, whether race goes into ethnicity or vice versa is a semantic game on the one hand. You could define the Scandinavian ethnicity by starting with the set of white people intersected with the the subset of people from a certain geographic area intersected with... Or, you could define the "white race" as the union of Scandinavians and Anglo-saxons and ...
Only one of these seems truly well-defined though. As you yourself have asserted, race is a poorly defined pseudoscientific category, where ethnicity actually has more precise scientific meaning. I don't see how ethnicity can be scientific if it depends upon a vague and unscientific clause. It simply must be the other way around, ie. pseudoscientific terms must start with the scientific basis and add bullshit, you don't start with bullshit and remove anything unscientific.
Good call. If they apparently don't want to see your comments, uh, "tutelaging" them here (as Belisarius Cawl so aptly puts it), why would they then "love" and join an entire Substack (and perhaps by "join" these fellows mean "actually pay for", even) by you?
I second the proposal, as long as @marxbro1917 spends at least a few blog posts on outlining his views in plain English, without too much political science jargon -- for those of us like myself, who are not well-versed in political science or history.
I would love this and I think SA would too, as would everyone else in the rationalist community. I don't know a thing about Marxism except that the labor theory of value has some issues and would love to be tutelaged on that.
The Revolutions podcast on the Russian revolution spends quite a few episodes on the history of Marxisim. Enlightening as well as entertaining. It is not over yet (think the year is 1912) so I am very excited to learn how it ends.
I'm still not clear on your working definition of rational in this context. It sounds like at least part of what you're saying is that rationality is related to making decisions that are aligned with your goals. Is that a fair interpretation?
Marxbro, have you considered the possibility that you and Scott simply have different interpretations of Marxism? If so, this might explain why he does not "correct his mistakes", because he does not believe they are mistakes.
Perhaps instead of asking someone you disagree with to "correct his mistakes", it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Another fruitful way to think about this is, how certain are you that your interpretation is correct? if your interpretation were wrong in some way (and I am not saying it is), how would you find out? What evidence would you need to see?
Marxbro is annoying, but I would generally trust an obsessive Marxist more than a Marx-hostile American libertarian on the topic of what Marx actually said. One of them is likely to have read a lot more Marx after all, and whilst the Marxist is no doubt biased so if the libertarian!
You mentioned in our last exchange that the reason you took Marx seriously was because of his prophesies about national communist revolutions. Could you give me a citation for where Marx predicts the occurrence of these as opposed to an international revolution after capitalism divides the globe into two classes of workers v. capitalists?
It is quite possible that he is not persuaded by your comments.
In any case, I think it might be a good idea for you to write a summary of what Marxism mean -- or maybe even marxbro1917-ism, if your vision differs substantially from Marx's original. Then, in a subsequent post, you could say, "as you can see, I believe X, and I have supplied solid evidence for X, and yet Scott persists in saying not-X, so he's wrong". Right now, it's hard for me to follow your objections, because I am missing a lot of context.
You are also fighting an uphill battle, because the poster children for Marxism are places like USSR/Maoist China/North Korea. You may argue that it is unfair or that they are doing Marxism wrong, but when you mention Marxism, that's what pops into people's heads. Again, writing an explanatory post might help with that.
Damn, I finally found a place where you argue for what you believe in instead of just asserting it, and I have to say it's pretty disappointing. Both of your concrete disagreements, at best, seem to be pointless, contentless semantic quibbles.
Marx says there is no essence to man inherent in every individual, only the social relations between people; Scott summarizes that as saying Marx did not believe in human nature. You say the summary is wrong because... I'm not sure? "Human nature" is different from "inherent essence of man" under the way you're using words, so Scott must have misunderstood Marx? Huh? Obviously Scott is using "human nature" to refer to the inborn essence present in ~every person on account of our genes, which sure does sound incompatible with "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual".
And then you complain about the "completely malleable" part, where I again can't even follow your argument. I'm going to expand on Scott's two words here in a way I think Scott would agree with, hopefully that will make it clearer. Marx says that social relations are all there is to the essence of man. Scott says that Marx believes humans are entirely shaped by their social relations, and that there's no unmalleable iron rod born within them that keeps its shape in the face of society. Sounds like a fair summary to me.
I legitimately can't even follow your arguments for why That's Not What Marx *Really* Meant. Disappointing.
Having read your comment about how ‘Scott’s reading of Marx is wrong in plain English,’ the basic drift is that you come across as rude, dismissive, and not at all persuasive. Just addressing the latter, it doesn’t seem coherent that an ‘essence of man’ exists, but that that essence isn’t ‘inherent,’ because that implies an essence isn’t essential. You say that this is wrong in plain English, but when we boil your argument down into a very plain-spoken style it seems a good deal worse. I would think you would get a better response on this if you would engage more charitably and make positive claims of your own about how Marx should be interpreted that can be challenged textually. You also say that ‘if people can’t read my short comments, why should I write long ones?’ but that’s the crux of Scott’s objection to tweeting: an awful lot of short low-quality snipes doesn’t equal one quality long-form objection.
You refer to "many" basic posts. Can you provide a list of, say, top three or top five? If at all possible, I would appreciate if they said something other than "you're wrong", "Scott, you're still wrong," or "Scott, how could you possibly be this wrong?!" Examples from the old blog would be welcome in this list of top five -- you've been a commenter for years, there's no reason that your best posts should have happened since the replatforming.
I think it is notable that even when you quote the bit from Scott that you say is an awful error, Scott has caveated his interpretation of Marx with 'as far I as I can tell'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Not to mention that the passage you're complaining about him misunderstanding is *super* opaque, so that if Marx is misunderstood it's kind of his own fault. He also admits that the interpretation he's giving is probably controversial!
I don't actually particularly trust Scott's ability to treat Marx, leftism, or (*especially*) feminism fairly, let alone the community's ability to do so, but I don't think the comment is the gotcha you think it is.
That is because you comments are of extremely low quality, to the point that I suspect that you are trolling. For example defending famines in North Korea as acceptable like you did recently.
I hope that you will be banned from commenting, you are one of reasons why I quite rarely read comments here.
It's an interesting conundrum: at what point does a person cross the line between reasonable interlocutor you disagree with and fool who should be ignored? Most people would acknowledge that there are some opinions that simply don't merit a reasoned response, but we never think we're on the wrong side of that line.
I'd say that what defines a fool are not opinions by themselves, but rather the manner in which he asserts them and his general disregard for accepted norms of communication. Also, ignoring them isn't really an option in the long run if you want to preserve those norms.
No, your politics are fine. It's your habit of interjecting in incredibly aggressive ways that people (including me) have a problem with. "Your extremely obvious mistakes" and "this [your post] is a good example of [bad things]" are examples in this thread of phrasings that will not lead anywhere positive; I could provide a hundred more examples if you're genuinely unsure what I'm talking about.
Unlike TTT, I happen to think you post some genuinely interesting stuff from time to time. If you merely stop coming at everyone guns blazing and teeth bared, you'll be a great part of the community and I'll be happy to defend you.
Censorship perhaps, but not cancelling. Cancelling would be if we attempted to find out your real-world identity and tried to get you fired from your job, get people around you in trouble for associating with you, follow you around to other internet fora to harass you there, drag up anything you've written many years ago that can be taken out of context to make you look like a monster, etc.
I think the above commenter wants you banned because you seem to prefer to in a rather harassing way appeal to authority rather than make civil and well-thought out arguments. I agree with him that you don't seem to be into making good arguments but I don't want you banned I think you're funny and write engagingly and I'm still hoping for a good rundown of marxism from you one day.
No, I am willing to discuss things with communists, nazis, racists, supporters of automobile and heretics. And I did on SSC (under a different username).
Are you actually claiming that people of North Korea are not oppressed, are not victims of famines caused by predictably failing economy and that regime there is not oppressive?
Because I consider
- North Korean regime is far more oppressive than typical country
- standard of living in North Korea is lower than in a typical country
- South Korea is far better place to live than North Korea by nearly all metrics
- many people want to escape North Korea, basically noone want to emigrate there
as facts and claiming otherwise seems to me a sign of being divorced from reality and unwilling to admit that communism and communism-adjacent things were a massive failure when implement on state level and caused deaths of millions.
I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one.
However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either).
I don't think any member of the international public (as opposed to intelligence agencies or the DPRK government) really has a good idea of Kim Jong-un's approval rating; NK is too secretive. Obviously he gets ~100% of the vote with ~100% turnout in elections, but that probably has something to do with the fact that failing to vote and voting for someone else are both illegal.
I won't rule out that his approval rating could legitimately be high, but the lack of civil war only really proves that it's at least 5% (the proportion of North Koreans in the military, which is pretty rigorously checked for loyalty) and probably not below 20% (given the extensive paramilitary forces).
"I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one."
Any country that has people desperately risking their lives to leave has a problem. Any country where attempting to leave the country is met with deadly force has a bigger problem.
That the trigger for the collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe was the opening of the border of one of the states allowing people to leave should make this obvious.
The only reason Venezuela has two people claiming to be president simultaneously is because one of them is promoted by the United States in a regime change effort.
>All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that
Have you ever left the United States to go and see for yourself how any of the socialist countries are doing? Why don't you spend a year in one of them to a have breath of fresh air from this bourgeoisie oppression we all have to endure here? For extra freshness, I highly recommend living on the local median wage. Or you might even test how these nice socialist governments are taking care of their people and try living on the amount equal to the minimum wage or unemployment check.
It's 1000% not because you have politics that we disagree with.
You complain how you constantly tell Scott he's wrong about Marxism and he doesn't listen to you.
Meanwhile, people *constantly* tell you that the way you behave in these comments is inappropriate and frustrating and that it has nothing to do with the policies you support, and yet you somehow keep believing that there's nothing wrong with your behavior and that you're being censored for your views.
To be clear: I know that it was very unkind, but I consider it as true and necessary.
Repeated baseless insults, presenting far leftists as utter idiots, tankiest takes that I have ever seen are something that makes discussion worse.
Please take your lame apologia for totalitarian states and failed ideologies that murdered millions, for no gain at all, to Facebook/Twitter/Stormfront.
This is not the kind of entertainment I come here for. If anything, I consider the temptation to respond to him at all to be a manifestation of the imp of the perverse, and having to fight against it (and recently, failing,) is a source of irritation practically every time I read the comments.
no offense, but this is your worst segue yet, marxbro, haha
Overall I'm not so much a fan of the whole "you're a sea lion!!" thing — I say you're perfectly entitled to pop in here and disagree with people about whatever. But this is just an attempt to completely derail a conversation about something completely different into the only thing you are interested in talking about.
you gotta open your mind to the wonders of discourse outside Marx!
Presumably denying the incredibly oppressive environments found in totalitarian states (e.g. North Korea) is at least equally productive. Those conversations really help open people's hearts to the true Word of our Lord.
Here's a primer on what Marx thought. Trigger warning: Marxists aren't going to like it, and anti-Marxists will want to share it on their social media far and wide, and quote from it frequently.
I earnestly, seriously mean this. Please get your own substack, let us know here (because I would actually love to subscribe), and dial down the antagonism in your comments here. I tend toward agreeing with you, but you're not doing your points any favors by how you make them here.
Yes! I second this and have suggested it before. Marxbro, I bet you've accidentally built an audience that would gladly engage with you for days, but here in the comments of someone else's substack is really not the place for it so you're going to draw a lot of criticism on that point.
Ah. a true believer. who wants agreement because he is "correct" not because he has a good argument. what happens when such people gain power? (this is an easy one). bro has assumptions he doesn't want challenged. the whole argument above IMO is about the blank slate hypothesis. Lefties seem to think we inherit nothing from thousands of years of biology, therefore they can mold the world into a more "correct" form in a generation or two. When that doesn't work, why, the "incorrect" ones who are spoiling things must be dealt with. killing becomes necessary. this also happens in righty authoritarian regimes. they need everyone on board to make it work. but human nature: there is some good research that I'm too lazy to look for now that humans have a strong tendency to ostracize out groups. Perhaps it's a function of trust and the need to have a heuristic for it. We do feel more comfortable with people who are like us. I think it would be fruitful to engage with this reality if we want to move toward an inclusive world - or you just end up killing those you don't want around. (but for really, really good reasons) imo bro wants agreement, not engagement. His Marxism is faith-based, and therefore cannot be dislodged with mere words.
Your commentary always boils down to "you misunderstand Marx". It rarely contains any interesting ideas to engage with. The desire to tell people RTFM is understandable, but please make an effort to meet Scott halfway. I (like Scott, I think) have little desire to go read Das Kapital right now but would like to actually have an informative conversation about how Marxism could apply to the topics under discussion.
Are you really a marxist or do you secretly hate communism and want to be very sure nobody on SSC/ASC ever takes it seriously? Because my impression is you're doing so good a job on the latter it almost can't be accidental.
Assuming you're serious, imagine that on your favorite ultra-left forum whatever that is comes up a guy with a nickname like "SocialDarwinistBro" and starts argue hardcore anarcho-capitalism in the most straw-manned variety. He bytes every bullet offered, saying that poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and stupid, that free market is effective and therefore its outcomes cannot be bad by definition, etc. Whenever someone suggests that you know, it may be a little bit uncharitable and over the top what you're saying here, he says they're just not familiar with the history of great depression and works of Adam Smith, or reading them incorrectly. He's also by far the most obnoxious commentator and most of his comments bear at most tangential relationship to the post and hand and largely amount to "Also, an-cap is really cool!" And he constantly accuses all around that they fail to adhere to the principles of dialectical materialism by not engaging with him.
Would this guy have any chances of converting anyone at all? Would there be any more effective way to make people think "Holy Lenin those libertarians really are massive jerks, I'll surely stick with marxism!"
I see what you mean, thank you for clearing my doubts. Please keep on doing what you're doing comrade, in the name of Stalin we'll reeducate these kulaks.
Hopefully this isn't countersignalling my fellow readers too much, but your posts always make me laff (this one particular) and I hope you keep at it. Shine on...
It's kind of funny, but not the kind of humor I'd want to come here for. It's a legit instance of Poe's Law, where I'm genuinely uncertain whether he's being dense or trolling, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of interaction I look for at ACX.
After reviewing more of marxbro1917's participation, my take now leans more in the direction that he's actually a conscious and deliberate troll. While he's extremely prolific in responding to object and meta level disagreements, as far as I can tell he never actually engages with allegations that he's trolling, either from commenters on the conversations, or from his interlocutors embedded in those conversations.
Non-trolling people tend to be pretty touchy about allegations that they're trolling, and trolls will often imitate that to appear like non-trolls, but in my experience actual trolls are much more likely than non-trolls to ignore them, because badly defending argumentative positions is conducive to the purposes of trolling, but badly defending the position that one isn't a troll isn't. It's hard to offer strong evidence that you're not a troll when you are, and rather than calling attention to that, it's easier just to avoid the subject.
you'd change your mind if you were worried about getting a job or losing one. also, corporations are heavily influenced by government and vice versa imo. power is power
Many people have financial independence because of things like rich parents, and as a hobby to stay busy spend their time online harassing people who aren't independently wealthy out of their jobs.
This isn't surprising. I knew rich kids in high school who did the same sort of asymmetric warfare on the not-as-wealth kids as a power play. I have two examples of them deliberately trying to cause car crashes (no collision or injuries occurred, thankfully) because their parents could easily afford new cars while a car crash would be economically devastating to the other kid.
So, like I said, it's not surprising to see people still doing it.
It *is* surprising to see someone think that this is a benevolent state of affairs.
This does actually seem to point to a fairly important difference between what most people regard as acceptable boycotts and unacceptable cancellation - boycotts are generally an attempt to change or influence ongoing behavior by an organization. The success criteria, such as it is, is the behavior changing, not e.g. specific named executives being fired (though I'm sure among all the boycotters you'll find some calling for that too). Cancellation seems to not care that some tweets you made 10 years ago aren't representative of your current views or behavior in either a personal or professional capacity; it's not calling for a change in your behavior at all. It's calling for you to be fired (or deplatformed, or whatever). Even in those cases where it's triggered by new/ongoing behavior, the goal never seems to be to "change the behavior" per se.
Yeah, the goal of cancelling is to pick a random example and publicly destroy them "pour encourager les autres". To be an effective deterrent, either the chance of getting caught must be very high, or the punishment must be grossly disproportionate to the crime, and cancellation is all about the latter.
It follows that:
a) Once you've been picked for cancellation, nothing you say or do can stop it anymore. That would defeat the purpose: we don't want people to think that they can engage in the bad behavior for a while and then just repent at the last moment.
b) The people chosen for cancellation won't necessarily be the most egregrious examples. You don't want to draw a bright line and tell people that they are safe as long as they don't cross that line; you want them to be afraid of even coming within a mile of the line, and to be at least a little bit nervous even when they are nowhere near it.
One of the things that came out of the discussion after the release of the Harper's Letter, was that for a bunch of people who signed it, and people who supported it, it turned out that there was a C as well, and is actually one of the big concerns, and that's not being even a mile of that bright line, and being thrown over it anyway. Having your ideas misrepresented or just straight-up lied about and then being cancelled based on that.
I think that one thing that's often missed is that being "Liberal" on these issues is often seen as being just as bad as being "Conservative". Of course that's not how it's framed....that framing would tear down the entire structure, but that's how it's coming across. Personally, I see the issue as one of kayfabe, where the Progressives are seen as the babyfaces, even if they're annoyingly so sometimes, and everybody else is the heel. If that dynamic gets broken, if it could be acknowledged that sometimes Progressives ARE the heels...either dealing with their own forms of racism/sexism/etc. or have different, more self-serving motives at play, then we can get some reciprocity into the system, which I think will set a more healthy set of norms.
"sometimes"
Excellent points.
That leads me to an empirical hypothesis: there is a pretty high correlation between how cogent a comment is and whether it includes the phrase ""pour encourager les autres."
I wouldn't consider this the most important difference that makes boycotting OK in some situations: if they just threatened to fire someone unless he shuts up, we'd still consider that wrong. To me, the line is that I oppose punishing people over speech, specifically where the person isn't employed for his opinions (as an opinion journalist or a politician is), and where the speech in question is off the job, or at a workplace where the expression of other political opinions is generally accepted.
This is a bit of a motte and bailey (or perhaps a weakman, depending on which side you're on), because "cancel culture" has been used to describe basically any form of attack on the right wing. Digging up old tweets to get someone fired? Cancel culture. Calling to vote out a senator in November? Cancel culture. Saying that a book is problematic without in any way suggesting that people should be fired for writing or publishing it? Cancel culture. Disqualifying a horse from the Kentucky Derby? Cancel culture.
(Calling for NFL players to get fired if they kneel during the anthem? Not cancel culture, apparently.)
It's easy to find examples of cancel culture gone too far, but it's also easy to find examples of "any speech I don't like is cancel culture."
There's a recent example of a Republican congressman recently whining about being cancelled in his book about being cancelled (Hawley I think?). What was funny was his (paraphrase) - "Go get my book about being cancelled, which they don't want you to read, available on Amazon Prime!"
Puritan villages didn't "self destruct after a generation or two".
Puritans were vastly fertile. 17th Century Waltham, MA had a total fertility rate of 9 per woman according to Harvard economic historian David Landes, one of the highest figures in history. There are a huge number of descendants of the Puritans spread across the northern half of the United States today.
A bunch of weird unstable repressive cult members, "super isolated" sounds like a few online communities I've had the misfortune of encountering. Just sayin'....
Couple of things. There is a difference between puritans and pilgrims. The pilgrims are the ones that sailed to America initially (in 1620). They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
The Puritans came to America later on. They were called the "puritans" because they tried to stay in England and purify the state church. That didn't work, so they eventually headed to America as it started to become more settled.
They left England in pursuit of religious freedom, and found it in Holland. They left Holland, in part, because they realized that religious freedom meant their kids might join the wrong church.
The whole Reformation was mostly like that: Breaking away from an oppressive orthodoxy so that you could start your own, different oppressive orthodoxy.
The Puritans opposed a proposal of religious freedom in England, because that would mean the freedom to be Catholic. In that case, they would rather not have it at all.
> They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
But not to respect it too much if "religious freedom" just meant "freedom for our kooky brand of religion and for building intolerable cities based on our creed".
I think the country they ended up birthing turned out ok.
New England is not the whole country.
Financially yes. Culture and lifestyle wise could do much better...
Very interesting article, thanks.
I've seen arguments that Social Justice is a religion-- irritable comments from Jews that it's just Original Sin, and an extended analysis from John McWhorter that Social Justice is a religion, but it's worth seeing an analysis of *which* religion is being replayed,.
The argument is that it's faith-based Protestantism, which I think (possibly after it's over-simplified from its more sophisticated versions) is the essential thing is to have the right mental states and to prove them by one's public behavior.
The mental state standard can take a surprising variety of forms-- grim, misery-inducing religion, New Thought (the mind creates reality, if anything goes wrong in your life, it's because you were thinking wrong), and now Social Justice, where the tiniest vestige of possible racism must be eliminated.
I can't make sense of the claim in the article that Social Justice is nativist.
Do you have a link to McWhorter's commentary?
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering why self-described "leftists" would ally themselves with religious conservatives (or would that be religious reactionaries ?). Now it makes perfect sense !
This is terrifying. I might need to prepare for emigration as an option...
McWhorter's comments elsewhere on his blog about his choice of name for the book were disappointing. Punching up, punching down, it's less bad to be awful to someone if they don't have enough melanin. I thought the point of learning from the 60s and before was that it was the mindset that was the awful thing, not the choice of target. But alas, a targetist our John is.
I'm not particularly convinced, however this part :
"scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
I was tempted to answer "Amen to that !", which, considering this (Jewish ?) source and John McWhorter's blogbook would be doubly ironic !
I came to the same conclusion a few weeks ago, better late than never I guess :
At the core this is about different cultures, or as the anthropologists call them, ethnic groups. See how the term "racism" is often improperly used for group hatreds which AFAIK (?) are genetically very similar, like Irish and English (?) or (Sephardi-only ?) Jews and Arabs (both "Semites" ?)
We now know that languages spread in a way quite different from genes, and so does culture in general (memes).
(Note that the common meaning of the term ethnicity seems to have been corrupted into a synonym for "race" by racists in the mid-20th century, when the term "race" itself became unfashionable.)
A tribe is an ethnic group that is smaller than Dunbar's number.
A Nation is an ethnic group which manages to keep together thanks to (post)modern inventions like the printing press and mandatory schooling, which allows millions to share the same symbols and values.
(The German style of nationalism went deep into essentialism, and combined with the (misuse of the) new science of biology and the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles has spawned Nazism.)
An Empire is yet another kind of political entity (a much older one than a Nation), under which there are "non-core" ethnic groups that are more or less persecuted, more or less free to live their separate lives (as long as they pay taxes).
> "scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
"Country" is also a fiction. A person's country still has plenty of real associations with their health, wealth, life span, education, and more. Should we stop trying to analyze different population outcomes according to the country? Of course not, and I don't see why "race" would be any different.
Certainly race isn't very precise or directly causal, but race-based research has its place, particularly when you don't have the funds for more precise data gathering to tease out ethnicities or other factors that go into "race".
Some fictions are better than others. "Race" seems to be both misleading and harmful, especially to civic Nations.
(And Nation is also probably a better fiction than Country, which is a bit too much tied to geography.)
(Also if anything it's "race" that goes into ethnicity, not the other way around.)
The point is, "better fiction" depends on what you're measuring and the resource cost to achieve a certain precision (time, money, etc.). You just can't make a universal claim like "nation is a better fiction than country", because other factors matter.
Finally, whether race goes into ethnicity or vice versa is a semantic game on the one hand. You could define the Scandinavian ethnicity by starting with the set of white people intersected with the the subset of people from a certain geographic area intersected with... Or, you could define the "white race" as the union of Scandinavians and Anglo-saxons and ...
Only one of these seems truly well-defined though. As you yourself have asserted, race is a poorly defined pseudoscientific category, where ethnicity actually has more precise scientific meaning. I don't see how ethnicity can be scientific if it depends upon a vague and unscientific clause. It simply must be the other way around, ie. pseudoscientific terms must start with the scientific basis and add bullshit, you don't start with bullshit and remove anything unscientific.
Good call. If they apparently don't want to see your comments, uh, "tutelaging" them here (as Belisarius Cawl so aptly puts it), why would they then "love" and join an entire Substack (and perhaps by "join" these fellows mean "actually pay for", even) by you?
I was not being sarcastic...
I pre-committed to not replying to you, but I can't resist the temptation. You can write at substack for free if you don't charge your readers.
https://becomeawritertoday.com/best-substack-newsletters/
(There's a list of recommended substacks, but there's also a faq.)
In case this sounds confrontational - it's really not.
Could you give a very fast rundown on what people misunderstand about Marxism? You could also just dump some links on me.
Sorry that the Internet has become such an anal space.
Lots of people prefer angry tweeting, but there are reasons to think that might not be the most effective way to change minds.
Well at least not in the direction intended.
I second the proposal, as long as @marxbro1917 spends at least a few blog posts on outlining his views in plain English, without too much political science jargon -- for those of us like myself, who are not well-versed in political science or history.
Nice idea.
I would love this and I think SA would too, as would everyone else in the rationalist community. I don't know a thing about Marxism except that the labor theory of value has some issues and would love to be tutelaged on that.
The Revolutions podcast on the Russian revolution spends quite a few episodes on the history of Marxisim. Enlightening as well as entertaining. It is not over yet (think the year is 1912) so I am very excited to learn how it ends.
Neat, thanks! Hope it ends well for everyone involved :)
UPDATE: A world war just broke out. Damn.
Fuck me. Well, at least humanity got it out of its system now. Looking forward to a future of international friendship and harmony!
Marx wrote some rather bigoted things, so I wouldn't necessarily expect the noble sealion to get a fair shake.
Is it right to understand this comment as an statement that Defund the Police is essentially a Marxist movement?
What is your definition of rational in the context of this comment?
This comment is probably a bit over the top but your display name is fantastic
I'm still not clear on your working definition of rational in this context. It sounds like at least part of what you're saying is that rationality is related to making decisions that are aligned with your goals. Is that a fair interpretation?
Marxbro, have you considered the possibility that you and Scott simply have different interpretations of Marxism? If so, this might explain why he does not "correct his mistakes", because he does not believe they are mistakes.
Perhaps instead of asking someone you disagree with to "correct his mistakes", it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Another fruitful way to think about this is, how certain are you that your interpretation is correct? if your interpretation were wrong in some way (and I am not saying it is), how would you find out? What evidence would you need to see?
Marxbro is annoying, but I would generally trust an obsessive Marxist more than a Marx-hostile American libertarian on the topic of what Marx actually said. One of them is likely to have read a lot more Marx after all, and whilst the Marxist is no doubt biased so if the libertarian!
You mentioned in our last exchange that the reason you took Marx seriously was because of his prophesies about national communist revolutions. Could you give me a citation for where Marx predicts the occurrence of these as opposed to an international revolution after capitalism divides the globe into two classes of workers v. capitalists?
Does disagreeing with you automatically make him wrong ?
It is quite possible that he is not persuaded by your comments.
In any case, I think it might be a good idea for you to write a summary of what Marxism mean -- or maybe even marxbro1917-ism, if your vision differs substantially from Marx's original. Then, in a subsequent post, you could say, "as you can see, I believe X, and I have supplied solid evidence for X, and yet Scott persists in saying not-X, so he's wrong". Right now, it's hard for me to follow your objections, because I am missing a lot of context.
You are also fighting an uphill battle, because the poster children for Marxism are places like USSR/Maoist China/North Korea. You may argue that it is unfair or that they are doing Marxism wrong, but when you mention Marxism, that's what pops into people's heads. Again, writing an explanatory post might help with that.
Damn, I finally found a place where you argue for what you believe in instead of just asserting it, and I have to say it's pretty disappointing. Both of your concrete disagreements, at best, seem to be pointless, contentless semantic quibbles.
Marx says there is no essence to man inherent in every individual, only the social relations between people; Scott summarizes that as saying Marx did not believe in human nature. You say the summary is wrong because... I'm not sure? "Human nature" is different from "inherent essence of man" under the way you're using words, so Scott must have misunderstood Marx? Huh? Obviously Scott is using "human nature" to refer to the inborn essence present in ~every person on account of our genes, which sure does sound incompatible with "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual".
And then you complain about the "completely malleable" part, where I again can't even follow your argument. I'm going to expand on Scott's two words here in a way I think Scott would agree with, hopefully that will make it clearer. Marx says that social relations are all there is to the essence of man. Scott says that Marx believes humans are entirely shaped by their social relations, and that there's no unmalleable iron rod born within them that keeps its shape in the face of society. Sounds like a fair summary to me.
I legitimately can't even follow your arguments for why That's Not What Marx *Really* Meant. Disappointing.
Having read your comment about how ‘Scott’s reading of Marx is wrong in plain English,’ the basic drift is that you come across as rude, dismissive, and not at all persuasive. Just addressing the latter, it doesn’t seem coherent that an ‘essence of man’ exists, but that that essence isn’t ‘inherent,’ because that implies an essence isn’t essential. You say that this is wrong in plain English, but when we boil your argument down into a very plain-spoken style it seems a good deal worse. I would think you would get a better response on this if you would engage more charitably and make positive claims of your own about how Marx should be interpreted that can be challenged textually. You also say that ‘if people can’t read my short comments, why should I write long ones?’ but that’s the crux of Scott’s objection to tweeting: an awful lot of short low-quality snipes doesn’t equal one quality long-form objection.
> I'm right here and I'm willing to have a discussion about this. Why isn't Scott able to correct his own mistaken thinking?
I assume then that you agree with everything Pete put in his reply to your link? You've had plenty of time to respond, after all.
You refer to "many" basic posts. Can you provide a list of, say, top three or top five? If at all possible, I would appreciate if they said something other than "you're wrong", "Scott, you're still wrong," or "Scott, how could you possibly be this wrong?!" Examples from the old blog would be welcome in this list of top five -- you've been a commenter for years, there's no reason that your best posts should have happened since the replatforming.
I think it is notable that even when you quote the bit from Scott that you say is an awful error, Scott has caveated his interpretation of Marx with 'as far I as I can tell'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Not to mention that the passage you're complaining about him misunderstanding is *super* opaque, so that if Marx is misunderstood it's kind of his own fault. He also admits that the interpretation he's giving is probably controversial!
I don't actually particularly trust Scott's ability to treat Marx, leftism, or (*especially*) feminism fairly, let alone the community's ability to do so, but I don't think the comment is the gotcha you think it is.
That is because you comments are of extremely low quality, to the point that I suspect that you are trolling. For example defending famines in North Korea as acceptable like you did recently.
I hope that you will be banned from commenting, you are one of reasons why I quite rarely read comments here.
In short, please go away.
It's an interesting conundrum: at what point does a person cross the line between reasonable interlocutor you disagree with and fool who should be ignored? Most people would acknowledge that there are some opinions that simply don't merit a reasoned response, but we never think we're on the wrong side of that line.
People ignoring a commenter is not censorship. I'm fine with the lack of any ban, but people are also free to tell him to go away.
I'd say that what defines a fool are not opinions by themselves, but rather the manner in which he asserts them and his general disregard for accepted norms of communication. Also, ignoring them isn't really an option in the long run if you want to preserve those norms.
No, your politics are fine. It's your habit of interjecting in incredibly aggressive ways that people (including me) have a problem with. "Your extremely obvious mistakes" and "this [your post] is a good example of [bad things]" are examples in this thread of phrasings that will not lead anywhere positive; I could provide a hundred more examples if you're genuinely unsure what I'm talking about.
Unlike TTT, I happen to think you post some genuinely interesting stuff from time to time. If you merely stop coming at everyone guns blazing and teeth bared, you'll be a great part of the community and I'll be happy to defend you.
Censorship perhaps, but not cancelling. Cancelling would be if we attempted to find out your real-world identity and tried to get you fired from your job, get people around you in trouble for associating with you, follow you around to other internet fora to harass you there, drag up anything you've written many years ago that can be taken out of context to make you look like a monster, etc.
I think the above commenter wants you banned because you seem to prefer to in a rather harassing way appeal to authority rather than make civil and well-thought out arguments. I agree with him that you don't seem to be into making good arguments but I don't want you banned I think you're funny and write engagingly and I'm still hoping for a good rundown of marxism from you one day.
No, I am willing to discuss things with communists, nazis, racists, supporters of automobile and heretics. And I did on SSC (under a different username).
As long as it is based on facts.
Things like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-170#comment-1879701
> The people of Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela all seem to be doing fine and support their government.
are demonstration that you lie/troll/hallucinate and discussion with you is a waste of time and you are harmful to discussion.
I want to get rid of you not because I disagree with you but because you are parody of people disagreeing with me.
Are you actually claiming that people of North Korea are not oppressed, are not victims of famines caused by predictably failing economy and that regime there is not oppressive?
Because I consider
- North Korean regime is far more oppressive than typical country
- standard of living in North Korea is lower than in a typical country
- South Korea is far better place to live than North Korea by nearly all metrics
- many people want to escape North Korea, basically noone want to emigrate there
as facts and claiming otherwise seems to me a sign of being divorced from reality and unwilling to admit that communism and communism-adjacent things were a massive failure when implement on state level and caused deaths of millions.
I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one.
However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either).
I don't think any member of the international public (as opposed to intelligence agencies or the DPRK government) really has a good idea of Kim Jong-un's approval rating; NK is too secretive. Obviously he gets ~100% of the vote with ~100% turnout in elections, but that probably has something to do with the fact that failing to vote and voting for someone else are both illegal.
I won't rule out that his approval rating could legitimately be high, but the lack of civil war only really proves that it's at least 5% (the proportion of North Koreans in the military, which is pretty rigorously checked for loyalty) and probably not below 20% (given the extensive paramilitary forces).
"I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one."
Any country that has people desperately risking their lives to leave has a problem. Any country where attempting to leave the country is met with deadly force has a bigger problem.
That the trigger for the collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe was the opening of the border of one of the states allowing people to leave should make this obvious.
The only reason Venezuela has two people claiming to be president simultaneously is because one of them is promoted by the United States in a regime change effort.
>All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that
Have you ever left the United States to go and see for yourself how any of the socialist countries are doing? Why don't you spend a year in one of them to a have breath of fresh air from this bourgeoisie oppression we all have to endure here? For extra freshness, I highly recommend living on the local median wage. Or you might even test how these nice socialist governments are taking care of their people and try living on the amount equal to the minimum wage or unemployment check.
It's 1000% not because you have politics that we disagree with.
You complain how you constantly tell Scott he's wrong about Marxism and he doesn't listen to you.
Meanwhile, people *constantly* tell you that the way you behave in these comments is inappropriate and frustrating and that it has nothing to do with the policies you support, and yet you somehow keep believing that there's nothing wrong with your behavior and that you're being censored for your views.
To be clear: I know that it was very unkind, but I consider it as true and necessary.
Repeated baseless insults, presenting far leftists as utter idiots, tankiest takes that I have ever seen are something that makes discussion worse.
Please take your lame apologia for totalitarian states and failed ideologies that murdered millions, for no gain at all, to Facebook/Twitter/Stormfront.
Sorry if that is an unwanted backseat moderation.
I second this.
👍
He's pretty funny though. and the drama around his posts are entertaining.
This is not the kind of entertainment I come here for. If anything, I consider the temptation to respond to him at all to be a manifestation of the imp of the perverse, and having to fight against it (and recently, failing,) is a source of irritation practically every time I read the comments.
💯
LMAO
no offense, but this is your worst segue yet, marxbro, haha
Overall I'm not so much a fan of the whole "you're a sea lion!!" thing — I say you're perfectly entitled to pop in here and disagree with people about whatever. But this is just an attempt to completely derail a conversation about something completely different into the only thing you are interested in talking about.
you gotta open your mind to the wonders of discourse outside Marx!
this is honestly amazing
i wonder, does there exist a conversation topic that can't be moved in a more productive conversation by switching to talking about marxism?
Presumably denying the incredibly oppressive environments found in totalitarian states (e.g. North Korea) is at least equally productive. Those conversations really help open people's hearts to the true Word of our Lord.
I would like to know exactly which part of this conversation you consider productive.
* facepalm *
'you know and *like*'
This suggests a new tactic, try very hard to become Scotts friend, then teach him the truth about Marx.
Here's a primer on what Marx thought. Trigger warning: Marxists aren't going to like it, and anti-Marxists will want to share it on their social media far and wide, and quote from it frequently.
https://archive.org/details/karlmarxracistfullcopyi/page/n19/mode/2up
I earnestly, seriously mean this. Please get your own substack, let us know here (because I would actually love to subscribe), and dial down the antagonism in your comments here. I tend toward agreeing with you, but you're not doing your points any favors by how you make them here.
Yes! I second this and have suggested it before. Marxbro, I bet you've accidentally built an audience that would gladly engage with you for days, but here in the comments of someone else's substack is really not the place for it so you're going to draw a lot of criticism on that point.
Typical Marxist, allergic to doing any real work!
A job? Don't over-exert yourself, man.
Ah. a true believer. who wants agreement because he is "correct" not because he has a good argument. what happens when such people gain power? (this is an easy one). bro has assumptions he doesn't want challenged. the whole argument above IMO is about the blank slate hypothesis. Lefties seem to think we inherit nothing from thousands of years of biology, therefore they can mold the world into a more "correct" form in a generation or two. When that doesn't work, why, the "incorrect" ones who are spoiling things must be dealt with. killing becomes necessary. this also happens in righty authoritarian regimes. they need everyone on board to make it work. but human nature: there is some good research that I'm too lazy to look for now that humans have a strong tendency to ostracize out groups. Perhaps it's a function of trust and the need to have a heuristic for it. We do feel more comfortable with people who are like us. I think it would be fruitful to engage with this reality if we want to move toward an inclusive world - or you just end up killing those you don't want around. (but for really, really good reasons) imo bro wants agreement, not engagement. His Marxism is faith-based, and therefore cannot be dislodged with mere words.
Your commentary always boils down to "you misunderstand Marx". It rarely contains any interesting ideas to engage with. The desire to tell people RTFM is understandable, but please make an effort to meet Scott halfway. I (like Scott, I think) have little desire to go read Das Kapital right now but would like to actually have an informative conversation about how Marxism could apply to the topics under discussion.
Are you really a marxist or do you secretly hate communism and want to be very sure nobody on SSC/ASC ever takes it seriously? Because my impression is you're doing so good a job on the latter it almost can't be accidental.
Assuming you're serious, imagine that on your favorite ultra-left forum whatever that is comes up a guy with a nickname like "SocialDarwinistBro" and starts argue hardcore anarcho-capitalism in the most straw-manned variety. He bytes every bullet offered, saying that poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and stupid, that free market is effective and therefore its outcomes cannot be bad by definition, etc. Whenever someone suggests that you know, it may be a little bit uncharitable and over the top what you're saying here, he says they're just not familiar with the history of great depression and works of Adam Smith, or reading them incorrectly. He's also by far the most obnoxious commentator and most of his comments bear at most tangential relationship to the post and hand and largely amount to "Also, an-cap is really cool!" And he constantly accuses all around that they fail to adhere to the principles of dialectical materialism by not engaging with him.
Would this guy have any chances of converting anyone at all? Would there be any more effective way to make people think "Holy Lenin those libertarians really are massive jerks, I'll surely stick with marxism!"
I see what you mean, thank you for clearing my doubts. Please keep on doing what you're doing comrade, in the name of Stalin we'll reeducate these kulaks.
Hopefully this isn't countersignalling my fellow readers too much, but your posts always make me laff (this one particular) and I hope you keep at it. Shine on...
It's kind of funny, but not the kind of humor I'd want to come here for. It's a legit instance of Poe's Law, where I'm genuinely uncertain whether he's being dense or trolling, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of interaction I look for at ACX.
After reviewing more of marxbro1917's participation, my take now leans more in the direction that he's actually a conscious and deliberate troll. While he's extremely prolific in responding to object and meta level disagreements, as far as I can tell he never actually engages with allegations that he's trolling, either from commenters on the conversations, or from his interlocutors embedded in those conversations.
Non-trolling people tend to be pretty touchy about allegations that they're trolling, and trolls will often imitate that to appear like non-trolls, but in my experience actual trolls are much more likely than non-trolls to ignore them, because badly defending argumentative positions is conducive to the purposes of trolling, but badly defending the position that one isn't a troll isn't. It's hard to offer strong evidence that you're not a troll when you are, and rather than calling attention to that, it's easier just to avoid the subject.