A couple of points that I thought about reading this.
I think it’s probably true that some valuable right wing ideas have been overlooked due to the larger left-wing academic cultural milieu. I very regularly see people on all ends of the political spectrum reject ideas out of turn, just because they don’t fit into something they see as a socially important grouping of political ideas.
However,
I strongly suspect that the most potent wells of useful political thought won’t overlooked ideas from the left or right wing, but non-American, and more broadly, non-Western modes of political thought. Even just as an Australian, it can be frustrating how rigidly many users here stick to the American political overton window; assuming strong correlations between fundamentally unrelated ideas (for example, a correlation between socialism and anti-racism; or between conservatism and fossil fuel spruiking).
As for your actual points:
I don’t think leftist systems of thought have ever particularly had trouble with the notion that people can be more productive or powerful with access to tools or capital, the disagreement is in how to deal with the distributional effects of this. The mention of Nathan Cofnas and their ideas (a thinly veiled retelling of the narrative of racial differences in intellectual capability; a field of science full of bogus sociology, even more bogus biology (I’ve yet to have a proponent explain to me what exactly unites all black people (the skin colour group with the largest amount of genetic diversity of any on the planet) apart from skin colour, or to come up with a compelling narrative for why people from privileged racial groups in the richest areas of the modern world miraculously happen to score highly on these metrics); but that somehow continues to play well in “rationalist” spaces, I presume because it nebulously feels like forbidden knowledge. In retrospect this probably should’ve been a paragraph, not a set of brackets...), seem completely superfluous given the subject matter.
I actually agree with your point about protectionism (although I think protectionism is a strong impulse on all end of politics, just one verboten by modern liberal globalist thought). I’m not sure why you bothered mentioning competition though, an orthogonal economy that doesn’t interact with the outside doesn’t need to compete, it just needs to produce the goods it needs internally. Given that the modern planet somehow produces everything it consumes without the use of AGI, it seems trivially true that that will continue to be possible.
I agree that the distinction between a grouping, and the members of that grouping is important. I often see this distinction fall away during wars, for example, where people are slaughtered for the nebulous national interest. I can see this distinction being very important with the advent of AGI.
However, I’m very uncomfortable with National Conservatism as a whole becoming more popular in America, since I could very easily see a world in which America uses its newfound leverage as the sole operator of AGI to maximize its citizens utility, with apocalyptic consequences for non-Americans (read, most human beings alive). If it was politically viable, I would back some sort of legislation that stated that if a country obtained AGI, that all human beings would automatically become citizens of that country; but I can’t imagine anyone ever passing such a bill. To be frank, even before the advent of such ardent nationalism in the United States, most people I know were already pretty frightened by the prospect of AGI being invented there...
A couple of points that I thought about reading this.
I think it’s probably true that some valuable right wing ideas have been overlooked due to the larger left-wing academic cultural milieu. I very regularly see people on all ends of the political spectrum reject ideas out of turn, just because they don’t fit into something they see as a socially important grouping of political ideas.
However,
I strongly suspect that the most potent wells of useful political thought won’t overlooked ideas from the left or right wing, but non-American, and more broadly, non-Western modes of political thought. Even just as an Australian, it can be frustrating how rigidly many users here stick to the American political overton window; assuming strong correlations between fundamentally unrelated ideas (for example, a correlation between socialism and anti-racism; or between conservatism and fossil fuel spruiking).
As for your actual points:
I don’t think leftist systems of thought have ever particularly had trouble with the notion that people can be more productive or powerful with access to tools or capital, the disagreement is in how to deal with the distributional effects of this. The mention of Nathan Cofnas and their ideas (a thinly veiled retelling of the narrative of racial differences in intellectual capability; a field of science full of bogus sociology, even more bogus biology (I’ve yet to have a proponent explain to me what exactly unites all black people (the skin colour group with the largest amount of genetic diversity of any on the planet) apart from skin colour, or to come up with a compelling narrative for why people from privileged racial groups in the richest areas of the modern world miraculously happen to score highly on these metrics); but that somehow continues to play well in “rationalist” spaces, I presume because it nebulously feels like forbidden knowledge. In retrospect this probably should’ve been a paragraph, not a set of brackets...), seem completely superfluous given the subject matter.
I actually agree with your point about protectionism (although I think protectionism is a strong impulse on all end of politics, just one verboten by modern liberal globalist thought). I’m not sure why you bothered mentioning competition though, an orthogonal economy that doesn’t interact with the outside doesn’t need to compete, it just needs to produce the goods it needs internally. Given that the modern planet somehow produces everything it consumes without the use of AGI, it seems trivially true that that will continue to be possible.
I agree that the distinction between a grouping, and the members of that grouping is important. I often see this distinction fall away during wars, for example, where people are slaughtered for the nebulous national interest. I can see this distinction being very important with the advent of AGI.
However, I’m very uncomfortable with National Conservatism as a whole becoming more popular in America, since I could very easily see a world in which America uses its newfound leverage as the sole operator of AGI to maximize its citizens utility, with apocalyptic consequences for non-Americans (read, most human beings alive). If it was politically viable, I would back some sort of legislation that stated that if a country obtained AGI, that all human beings would automatically become citizens of that country; but I can’t imagine anyone ever passing such a bill. To be frank, even before the advent of such ardent nationalism in the United States, most people I know were already pretty frightened by the prospect of AGI being invented there...