For instance, a bitcoin detractor could argue that the reference class should also include Beanie Babies, Dutch tulips, and other similar stores of value.
The difference is that it’s easy to make more tulips or Beanie Babies, but the maximum number of Bitcoins is fixed.
What changes is that I would like to have a million dollars as much as Joe would.
Um, what are you using to compare preferences across people.
Similarly, if I had to trade between Joe’s desire to live and my own, the latter would win.
How about Joe’s desire to live against you desire to not have him annoy you, or to have sex with his wife, or any number of other possible motives?
How do you distinguish the part of your ethics that you ignore in practice, e.g., not giving all your money to charity, from the part you insist you and everybody follow, e.g., not killing Joe even though he’s being really really annoying.
Demotic dictators are supposed to justify themselves by generating ideological support, but that doesn’t actually distinguish them from real world monarchies, because of all the ideology about God Put Me on the Throne,
“The People Support Me” is a lot easier to falsify then “God Put Me on the Throne”, thus you need correspondingly more oppression to keep anyone from falsifying it.
One of weirdest aspect of NRx is the complete lack of cultural conservatism—by that I mean the largely politics-independent changing of mores, atittudes, the kind of stuff e.g. Theodore Dalrymple bemoan.
Um, those changes are not politics independent. These changes are being caused by various political forces.
Politics is 100% culture-reducible, culture determines even what political concepts mean.
And where does culture come from?
1) It is illegal. It is a violation of criminal statutes that do not appear to be sourced, either directly or indirectly, from the Bible.
So if a law was passed saying its OK to kill members of group X, you’d have no problem killing them. My point is that the “it’s illegal” argument is a total cop-out.
Even if the atheist was a moral nihilist (of course he is conflating atheism and nihilism), it still would not be rational to carry out the action because we would hope that society’s condemnation from people with moral systems and appropriate deterrents (e.g the risk of getting caught and getting a life prison sentence) so even saying that moral nihilism will lead to mass murder is wrong, so long as a sufficiently large percentage of the population believe in consistent and sensible moral systems.
That’s an argument against promoting moral nihilism.
You’d be amazed what can seem intuitive when you find yourself in a situation where it would be really convenient for Joe to die.
A million dollars is a lot more zero-sum than not killing someone—if I give you a million dollars I lose a million dollars. To make the analogy more accurate, you’d need to stipulate that Joe will kill me if I don’t kill him.
No, just that you’ll get some benefit from killing him, e.g., you get to have sex with his wife.
I guess you’re worried that if the same argument works in both cases then you might end up obliged to give Joe $1M.
No, I’m claiming neither Kindly nor you actually believe the argument you’ve given.
So the simple-minded “do whatever makes people happiest” principle (a.k.a. total utilitarianism, but you don’t have to be a total utilitarian for this to be a reason, as opposed to the only possible reason, for doing something) gives the “right” answers in most cases.
Except, you’re not doing that, i.e., you’re not giving all your income to charity. So since you’re willing to ignore parts of your ethics when its inconvenient, why not also ignore the parts about not killing Joe when it would be convenient were Joe to die.
I’m not talking about a general rule against killing, I’m talking killing this particular guy named Joe, who’s really annoying me.
Ah, it’s not really about locus of control: the context is destitute people falling ill due to contaminated food. It’s more about situations where bad things happen that are not readily controlled or avoided due to lack of knowledge or circumstance.
So that’s an argument for why it would be better if life were fair.
That doesn’t explain the difference between a monarch and a dictator, as requested.
The question was specifically about demotic dictatorships. As for dictators in general, that depends on how the dictator legitimizes his rule.
The dictator doesn’t need to manufacture assent, they rather need to quash dissent...as would a monarch, as many did.
Monarchs had a lot less dissent to quash. For example, the dress code at Versailles required all men to carry swords. Compare that with a modern president, good luck getting close to him with so much as a pocket knife.
Yes, given that Soviet-type communism and fascism are roughly equivalent, but not all were Soviet-types, the roots of communist ideologies are about small kibbutz type tribes being collectivist, not totalitarianism. Really, one of the biggest unfairness and inaccuracy here is equating all communists with Sovietism, Leninism. The roots of the movement are egalitarian tribalism in the form of workplace collectives, not tyranny. Anarcho-communist always existed, anarcho-fascism needed to be invented by Jack Donovan, it wasn’t always a thing, this is the primary difference.
I don’t see what this is supposed to mean. In any case tribalism is just as much, probably even more, a part of human nature then collectivism.
What is even the point of proposing anything that was vulnerable to getting torn down?
Everything is vulnerable to being torn down. The question is how vulnerable, and how well it works in the mean time.
Maybe if you don’t value stability as much as I do… I find democracy stable
Look at all the attempts to build democracy in the third world. Also, if you want stability, the Austrian and French monarchies lasted far longer then any democracies have so far.
Both the Roman and especially Charlemagne’s empires were archipelagos compared to today’s states. Both contained many sub-states that where mostly left to govern themselves as long as they acknowledged imperial authority and paid taxes.
But all these features were also true for the dictatorships toppled say in the Arab Spring. Or Franco. People were not expected to be engaging in politics, support was not manufactured etc. Still there was unrest and instability.
The claim is that it is more pleasant to live under a monarchy or rightist dictatorship, where you’re at least allowed to keep to yourself.
One, students, intellectuals who care about things like freedom of speech: basically, with some cynicism you could see it they want a piece from the power cake. Perhaps a system that would offer them clear paths to power could defuse it, but being rebellious still feels more virtuous and empowering than repeating official propaganda for a chance of promotion and a sinecure so the only system I can imagine that could secure their support would be itself pretending to be perpetual rebels: welcome to the “Cathedral”.
Yes, the neoreactionary claim is that in that kind of intelligentsia environment people win based on their ability to signal piety (or virture) eventually the memes will evolve for maximal apparent piety. This is bad (or very bad) because at some point signaling piety becomes orthogonal to actually being good ideas. You wind up converging on ideas that super-stipulate human inbuilt values. When the pious ideas prove impractical this get’s blamed on not everyone being sufficiently pious, thus the least pious must be purged.
One of the weirdest and most scary facts of early 20th century Europe is that students were above-average likely to participate in proto-fascist movements.
Scarier then the large participation of students in proto-communist and actual communist movements?
Around the world, youth radicalism was visible in 1908, visible in 1848 and so on.
Jim’s proposed solution to this problem is based on restoration England:
1) Require an oath of loyalty to the official religion to serve in government and especial teach at colleges, so you don’t get radical professors radicalizing students.
2) If possible make the official religion as boring as possible, so smart people are encouraged to focus their energies on productive tasks, like business or science, rather then attempting to create ever more pious versions of the official religion.
Come on. Spending money on making a candidate or party attractive and advertised buys votes. Not literally but in the sense of increases the chance of people voting for them.
The studies I’ve seen suggest that once you’ve spent enough money so that the average voter knows how the candidate is, you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly, at least from regular advertising. Of course, if you are friends with the editor and can have him put a favorable spin on the actual reporting, that’s different. And it also relies on connections, not money.
Replace “Killing Joe”, with say “not giving Joe a million dollars” in that argument, what changes?
“wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?”
I don’t see what this quote is supposed to mean, besides a deep-wisdomy way of saying that you don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Then the harassers visit this guy. It would still be “If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’”.
The claim is that they would not be able to say what.
Has Villiam, or whoever is in charge now, investigated this?