Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Alt-Right?

[pbrower2a]

(08-28-2016, 12:34 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

Quote:LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought. It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.

Wow that sounds really healthy.  Yeah, get rid of that little inner voice telling you that maybe you might be behaving like an asshole.  

And interesting that these supposed champions of "rational thought" are appealing to their readers' "natural instincts" instead of reason:

Quote:Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.

In their politics, these new conservatives are only following their natural instincts...[which] includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.

Those of you who yearn for a "homogenenous" society in the 21st century can forget about it, it ain't happening.  The world is getting smaller all the time.  You might as well get used to your neighbors and learn to like them.  At least tolerate them.

Rationality has its virtues for problem-solving, but it offers no means of judging whether the object of problem-solving merits the efforts. At the extreme I think of the Nazis who had a problem to solve and did it with consummate rationality. The problem, of course, was the existence of persons against whom the Fuehrer had a grudge and wanted to rid the world of.

Self-censorship? An autistic person must suppress some behaviors just to seem adequately normal to cope in society. In any event we are all wise to avoid using racial and ethnic slurs and such other nastiness as f-bombs.  I do not want to sound like the late 'comedian' Sam Kinison or the mobsters in Goodfellas. I can reasonably accept that someone else's feelings are at least as legitimate as mine unless those are certifiably delusional. Concern for social standing? Maybe it is a good idea to not try to live a class or two above one's standing (it is expensive and it fools nobody, least of all those who really are in the Upper Crust) -- but concern for self-image is legitimate. Of course it is best that one live up to one's self-image, so don't stiff waitresses, obey traffic laws if one wants to claim to be an upstanding citizen, don't default on debts...

There is no "white culture" to defend. I have no qualms about pushing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to black people who try to push 'their' rap upon me.  If black people can have images of a black Jesus and a black Santa Claus, then why not a "Black Bach"? Culture may have an ethnic flavor (there is no question that Degas is French, Dvorak is Czech, or Dostoevsky is Russian) but the really good stuff is accessible even with its ethnic flavoring. I do not have to be Japanese to recognize Hokusai as part of 'my culture'.

The attempt to achieve purity of culture as a cause of identity of a people is absurd. Racial homogenization is going on whether one likes it or not, and nobody can be sure what cultural  identity the very black-looking child of a black man and a white mother has. Melanin does not have culture.