[FRIAM] words for Nick (political-words focused)
Eric Charles
eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Sat Aug 22 18:41:18 EDT 2020
David,
That might have been true at some point, it is not any more. At this point
they have different oligarchs they would prefer to control us, and those
oligarchs have different aspects of our lives that they want to control.
Neither major party has any interest in net-increasing personal liberty.
The Bush II years saw HUGE decreases in freedom, and a huge uptick in
Orwellian messaging (do you remember the "free speech zones"!?! Where Bush
would protect your right to speech, but only if you stood in a fenced off
cage while you were talking?). Trump certainly hasn't helped. Did Bush I?
What regime of Republican control are you trying to reference? McConnell
stopped Obama from doing lots of things, but all evidence is (based on his
behavior and his overt speech) that his goal was to stonewall Obama, not to
fight for our freedom. Plus, a huge chunk of the Republican Party (as it is
today) would happily restrict our freedoms in line with the dogma of their
particular brand of Christianity.
I mean, you can't be pushing for net freedom if you think a baker should be
free to refuse bake a cake for a gay couple, but also think that being a
gay couple should be criminal.
Now, maybe you are more annoyed about the freedoms that the Democrats are
trying to take away than the freedoms the Republicans are trying to take
away. I know many people who feel that way, and I know many who feel the
opposite way.... but that doesn't make either one actually pro-freedom.
On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 2:21 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:
> Eric C. wrote:
>
> *"A liberal is someone who is striving to increase liberty (for whatever
> reason). An authoritarian is striving to give control to a small central
> group or individual (for whatever reason)."*
>
> Around here, your observation would be 180 degrees opposite.
>
> A liberal (read Democrat) is someone who is striving to increase control
> by a small central group (by reasons of the fact that they are smarter and
> more enlightened than everyone else and only centralized government works)
> A conservative [substituted because I think your use of authoritarian
> violated the orthogonality you correctly noted.] (read Reupublican) is
> someone who is striving to increase individual liberty and freedom from
> intervention (by reason of seeing themselves as adults capable of making
> their own decisions.)
>
> davew
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2020, at 9:03 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
>
> Liberal; was, "laissez-faire, free market"; is now, "humanist, socialist".
>
> Conservative: was "royalist, authoritarian; is now, "fascist,
> oligarchic."
>
>
> It is worse than that. At this point they don't mean anything so clear as
> what your quote implies.
>
> Circa the French and American revolutions, the royalists were correctly
> labeled as conservatives, because authoritarian-government was what they
> had already, and the liberals were progressive, because they thought a
> world with more freedom would be a better world. So a bunch of the terms
> became conflated by historic accident.
>
> It *should *be that there is a spectrum from libral to authoritarian, and
> an orthagonal scale from progressive to conservative.
>
>
> A liberal is someone who is striving to increase liberty (for whatever
> reason). An authoritarian is striving to give control to a small central
> group or individual (for whatever reason).
>
> A progressive is striving towards some future state (gambling with the
> current state in the belief there are better states coming). A conservative
> is striving to maintain the current state (leering of risking what we have,
> because what comes next might be worse).
>
> It should, therefore, be possible to be a libreal conservative, a liberal
> progressive, an authoritarian conservative, or an authoritarian
> progressive, depending on what the current state is, and whether you want
> to keep it or move on from it.
>
> If we had people on some sort of normal distribution of people in those
> perspectives, with all of them coming to the town square, they could act as
> checks and balances on each other. Society-as-a-whole could be most
> conservative about the things that most needed conserving, while being the
> most progressive about the things that most needed progressing. Similarly,
> we could be delicate and precise in our restrictions of freedoms. THAT is
> the means by which democracy adds value as a means of governing (see Dewey,
> Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other pragmatist political philosophers). That
> democracy is sometimes implemented as "50% + 1 can do whatever they want"
> is a different matter entirely, which is why (as brought up in FRIAM this
> week), "the tyranny of the majority" was a big topic of discussion at
> various points in the past.
>
> The conflation of the crucial political terms has made it
> extremely difficult to have certain types of political conversations in the
> U.S. For example, the cake-baking controversy:
>
> - Some people think that forcing someone to bake a cake for an event
> they don't want to support is a "liberal" stance. That's crazy. The liberal
> stance would be to let the bakers do what they want. Telling them they have
> to bake the cake *because *a world in which they bake the cake is a
> better world, is a progressive-authoritarian stance. (It might be the right
> thing to do, it might be the wrong thing to do; our inability to describe
> the stances sensibly interferes with our ability to reach consensus on
> the issue.) Our "liberals" aren't trying to make us freer, they are trying
> to dictate from a seat of power; their efforts are authoritarian.
> - Other people think it would be a better world if the baker could
> refuse to make cakes much more broadly. For example, that it would be
> better if the bakers could refuse to bake cakes for interracial couples, or
> for a couple being married by a heathen religion. That isn't conservative
> at all! It isn't a respect for the hard-fought gains of the past and a
> reticence to risk losing those gains.
>
> Uhg!
>
> (Yes, yes, many of those so-called conservatives imagine that the "better
> state" they seek has already existed in some mythic past, but that is a
> different issue all together; our liberal-progressive founders were
> inspired by stories of ancient Greece and Rome, but they weren't trying to
> conserve ancient Greece.)
>
> Some other examples:
>
> - We have had Social Security in the U.S. for almost 100 years. At
> this point, it is a thing achieved in the distant past. Wanting to change
> social security *is* progressive, and efforts to ensure social
> security can continue as it is indefinitely *are *conservative.
> - At this point we have had a schizophrenic web of social-safety-net
> and wealth-redistribution programs for decades (from social security and
> food stamps to Pell grants, child tax credits, and first-time homebuyer
> programs). Each program has its own requirements, and its own hoops to jump
> through, and it could easily become a full time job just trying to get all
> the benefits one is entitled to. In the face of that, one could easily be a
> liberal-progressive arguing for Universal Basic Income, *if* you were
> using that as a means to dismantle the existing programs and provide people
> more freedom regarding how they are using the cash you are giving them.
> Milton Freedman argued in favor of UBI for that reason, but it is hard for
> most people to imagine that, because "wasn't he a conservative?" In
> contrast, one could also argue for UBI from an authoritarian position, if
> you can only think of the effort as coupled with a big tax increase,
> because your main motivation is to use government power to force more of
> rich people's money to be given to poor people. The latter is, in
> comparison to the Freedman version, much closer to the midline of the
> progressive-conservative spectrum.
>
> Uhg all around!
>
> When Libertarians complain (not as often now as in decades past) the two
> major parties are "basically the same" (not as true now as in past
> decades), they mean to point out that both parties are heavily, Heavily,
> authoritarian. Both parties flood power to the Presidency that shouldn't be
> there. Both parties want to legislate and regulate how people should behave
> in a heavy handed manner, in a ridiculously wide range of situations. Both
> parties are an inconsistent and contradictory mix of progressivism and
> conservatism, depending on the issue. Etc. See, for example, Pelosi tearing
> up the state of the union speech while working to nigh-simultaneously to
> ensuring the renewal of the Patriot Act and FISA, and worse, ensuring that
> it happened without any of the bi-partisan proposed amendments to enhance
> privacy protections. That is straight authoritarian-conservative where it
> counts, with a thin veneer of performative grandstanding. I get it Nancy,
> "Orange Man Bad!", but, like, would it be that hard to to support even a
> shred of actually liberal efforts while you are shouting that from the
> rafters?!?
>
> Sure, some of the things democrats want to dictate about my behavior are
> different than some of the things conservatives want to dictate... but
> those are (under more normal circumstances) small details, if you would
> consider the possibility that we could maybe go a few years without
> stripping freedoms and without funneling more unchecked power to the
> Presidency. If I stand a decent distance on the liberal side of the
> liberal-to-authoritarian spectrum, and both "major parties" stand towards
> the extreme of the authoritarian side, sharing the variation from
> authoritarian-progressive to authoritarian-conservative with a heavy amount
> of overlap, they look pretty similar from where I stand a lot of the time.
>
> Of course, there is a difference, and I have a preference, and there is a
> lot more pressure to vote that preference this cycle than in more normal
> cycles... but that is a different issue.
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:22 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, we add to Dave's list, as follows.
>
> Liberal; was, "laissez-faire, free market"; is now, "humanist, socialist".
>
> Conservative: was "royalist, authoritarian; is now, "fascist, oligarchic."
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russell Standish
> Sent: Friday, August 21, 2020 8:27 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:24:20AM -0400, Eric Charles wrote:
> > "Awesome" is one of my favorites. Now used to indicate general
> > goodness. Not generally used in situations where one say "i was in awe".
> >
> > "Liberal" and "conservative" are two of my least favorite. Liberal
> > was about promoting freedom. Conservative was about retaining past
> > ways. Note that those are clearly orthogonal issues in their original
> > usage, and now we act like they are opposites, which is terrible.
>
> And just as bizarrely, in Australia they are synonyms. The Liberal party is
> the conservative party.
>
>
> --
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
> http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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