[FRIAM] words for Nick (political-words focused)
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 22 20:26:24 EDT 2020
What freedoms are Democrats trying to take away? The freedom to dump mine
tailings in creeks? That's the one that I can think of.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 4:41 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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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