They're all also massive, massive babies. Just fucking whining about everything, all the while accusing others of being childish. It's really something to behold.
Yeah, a case school is JD Vance blaming Europe to not have stopped the US to invade Iraq. Good to know man, next time we’ll send Luftwaffe to bomb the Pentagon and the White House. Don’t you know Germany has recently reformed her budget laws to spend illimited money for the army?
The rhetoric-not-arguments thing is real, amd not limited to the online right. I suspect it developed as a defense against argumentum ad racism, where online arguments were chiefly used as a technique for finding some specious grounds to rule one's interlocutor unfit to be tolerated, rather than finding truth. Regardless, we are all poorer for this development.
At least there are holdouts. EAs and neolibs have always been pathologically rational-argumentative, and the right has its spreadsheet racists.
Waaaaa I have political opponents waaaaa waaaa I don’t like their opinions waaaaa they should justify and explain their beliefs to me constantly waaaaa
Does anyone else remember about ten years ago, when all the most annoying people in the world would constantly tell you that it "wasn't their job to educate you"? Funny how things change.
Theres a lot of comments suggesting that this article relies on a bastardization of postmodernism. I don’t think that’s the case:
Postmodernism just refers to an incredulity towards meta-narratives (this is the standard definition offered by Lyotard in “The Postmodern Condition). And I think this is entirely true of many conservatives nowadays — it’s really difficult to identify any cohesive meta-narrative undergirding their thought.
We might suspect they have one along the lines of “the elites are bad and we need to fight to uphold our values”, but as Matthew (rightly) points out, their behavior is so often antithetical to this. They idolize a billionaire and, quite frequently, implode efforts to upend elitism (e.g. slashing welfare programs, lowering taxes for the rich, etc.). You might alternatively think it’s just a matter of pledging loyalty to Trump (this actually seems right), but that doesn’t constitute a meta-narrative considering that Trump is just a blip in history. So, either way, there’s a clear incredulity towards meta-narratives — they reject any principled ideologies governing how to view the progression of thought throughout history.
TLDR: The right no longer has a cohesive ideology. It’s just a club with loyalty signaling (without any consistent principles to which loyalty is pledged), and that certainly qualifies as a kind of postmodernism, even by the classical definition.
I don’t think any reasonable person is claiming that there aren’t people on the left who fit the description. The difference is that it appears much much more common on the right, and more importantly, the people on the right who are like this also happen to be the ones holding office and controlling significant power in the Republican Party (whereas among democrats, they tend to be very fringe figures who don’t have all that much influence). You cannot tell me that the left—particularly the leading figures—are as rife with inconsistency as the right.
The arguments against sending money to Africa are extremely simple and obvious. I wrote a post on the subject. Of course, the whole thing boils down to one's priors. From what I've seen, you never attempt to engage seriously with the differing priors of people who don't share your worldview. Instead, you write something like this generalizing them all as evilmeanbadstupid. In that sense, you are guilty of "dunking" just like the people you are criticizing.
Your argument is valid in the sense that “I don’t give to charity” logically follows from “I assign zero moral weight to people I don’t know.” Questioning the premise is pretty easy though. The standard argument is something like ten dollars makes no difference to me, but could, with some probability, save the life of some other person. If the situation were reversed, I’d appreciate that quite a bit, especially if that person were my child. That’s why I give to charity.
You seem to entirely accept the utilitarian framework, and just have a very sharp cutoff for your utility function. I’m not sure it’s immoral, exactly, just uncharitable in every sense.
It's not necessarily that I assign zero value to people I don't know, it's more that we're working with levels of uncertainty that are impossible to resolve in any sensible fashion. You give the example of "ten dollars makes no difference to me but could save the life of some other person." Okay, so I give ten dollars out to whoever or whatever that is. But I have a lot more than ten dollars in my bank account. If every $10 that I give away saves a life, and $10 "makes no difference to me," should I not keep giving out $10, over and over, until all of a sudden I've given away much more than $10 and the amount suddenly makes quite a big difference to me?
People with your viewpoint, IME, never attempt to actually square this circle. Instead you just keep it at this vague level of abstraction as if the formula for how much money "saves a life" and how much of it you should give away and when is really intuitive and obvious and known by everyone.
But this is interesting, because you basically agree with my premise, that 10 dollars to me is not all that useful, but very useful to someone else. If we agree on this, we’re basically talking terms then. How much does one give? Just the ten? More? I argue, and I think you’d agree, ten is better than zero.
Your example of infinitely giving ten dollars isn’t a strawman, because this is literally what Peter Singer argues. Personally I don’t bother trying to optimize much, I just set the amount I give at some value I won’t really notice in my paycheck. I think it’s like $100/month?
It sounds like your objection is more to the OBLIGATION than the actual charity itself, is that correct?
Well, the core of my objection is that I have a wife and a kid, and further than that, I have siblings and cousins and all the rest of it. If I'm going to earmark money for anyone that isn't me, the wife and kid rank far, far above anyone else, and then even after them, my other family members and direct community are another immeasurable distance above random people in Africa.
So you're looking at a model where the weighting of where my money goes is something unfathomable like x500000000 towards wife and kid, and x0.0000001 to random Africans. In this sense I don't technically assign literally zero weight to the random Africans, but in practice, they're never getting any of my money. And of course these figures are just totally made up for the sake of example as it's a bit silly to try and truly quantify these things to begin with. My duty to my wife and kid simply takes absolute precedence over the concerns of strangers on another continent.
If you legitimately view yourself as an atomized individual with absolutely no duty or concern towards anyone in particular, then the EA model of giving all your money to Africa makes a bit more sense. But that view of human existence is nonsensical to me.
The uncertainty argument is a fairly well known flaw where it is said just because there is a continuum with blurry lines demarcating concepts, that the concepts are nonsensical. An illustrative example is a beard, where one hair in your face definitely is not a beard, nor is two, or five. It's unclear the exact number of hairs at which point it becomes a beard, but that doesn't mean beards do not exist.
I think you understand this because you said in the article that you do in fact give to the church, where the same uncertainty applies. Jesus never said the exact figure that one is supposed to give. The extra 10 dollars of alms will make more difference to the needy than you repeatedly, if there's no limiting factor, it follows giving to the church is wrong also.
By giving to the church despite the present uncertainty, you seem to acknowledge that one doesn't need to know the exact point where it becomes "going the extra mile" in order to do some of it.
Oh, when you mentioned that $10 to you isn't as important as to a poor child who is starving. Maybe I'm using it wrong? My understanding is that marginal utility is when there is a change in the utility in the next "amount" of a thing. So, for you, the next $10 isn't as important as the previous ones, since you're likely quite comfortable, but for a poor child, the next $10 is very important. I was just referencing a term I believed fit your thought process.
Agreed at the end of the day it’s about first principles and ultimately whose first principles are in accordance with reality and truth. Everything else is just begging the question
A lot of these online rightist types are going to be very disappointed when they find out that "The Based Ritual," as Hanania calls it, will never work on regular, well-adjusted people, and they will rightly find anyone who engages in it disgusting.
Which theory? The theory that people who don't follow the Based Ritual are gay, or the theory that, because you personally started following it, that proves that all normal, well-adjusted people will be convinced to become rightoids just because some losers respond "based" to any dumb rightoid opinion they hear? If it's the former, I'd like to hear how being anti-socialist is gay, and if it's the latter, I'd like to see what sort of mental gymnastics you can use to justify it. I'm sure it will be entertaining either way.
Man, I'm often unconvinced by your philosophical arguments - anthropic, psycho-physical or otherwise -, but at least I'll readily admit that they *are* arguments, developed in full depth, and worthy of intellectual engagement if one has the time and inclination.
What I'm wondering here is, why do you bother to argue random vibes with these people who are not even producing or discussing arguments? And then share it with your subscribers?
Yeah I think pretty much every EA argument is terrible but I suppose it’s commendable they argue. Dunking on RW twitter seems silly though because a rw could easily say the exact same on progressive twitter. The ultimate question is really who is correct
Aw sweetheart.. I already told you that you shouldn’t feel bad about that exchange. We all do it sometimes. You gave me a good chuckle, isn’t that enough? I know it stung, but that’s just what happens when you play outside your kiddie pool rationalist comfort zone. This post was completely unnecessary.
I see that you still haven’t actually digested what I said. There was no snark in it, if you can believe it. You hug your ego so damn tight that you’re suffocating it to death. Let go of it and for once, think like a person, my dear bugman. Like I said already, I believe in you. You can break out of it.
I don’t care whether he’s right or wrong. I am trying to teach him that most of the world doesn’t either. Whimpering “but I am right! I am sooo right!” to himself will not win him any arguments outside the rationalist kiddie pool. Worry not, I can and do get in that pool sometimes. It can make for good practice, but one must actually apply it outside for it to matter at all.
Do any of you rats understand metaphors? Or do they cut that faculty out of your brains at the entryway? As much as I enjoy competition, this isn’t a pissing contest for me. So, if you’d be kind enough to go point that wretched thing at someone else I’d be very grateful.
Nah. You might say it, and you’re welcome to. Fact is that we had the exact same exchange last year and the lad has seemingly learned nothing at all since then. He’s actually walked a few steps backward. There’s a reason he knew I’m friends with the infamous Walt. Although even there, dude forgot that I’m a woman.
The problem here is that you think the fact he hasn't accepted your non-arguments is proof that he hasn't learned something that he should've. He hasn't learned anything from you because you have nothing to teach. Well, except as a case study of the pathologies of the online right, which Matthew has evidently learned a lot about.
Who told you I am on the right? I am not even online half the time and I prefer it that way.
You trust the word of someone that self-evidently has no idea what he’s talking about or even whom he’s talking about. Willful ignorance is not a pretty thing to prance about in, but you do you.
So no objection to the rest of my comment, then? Just latching onto one word that you dispute? Won't change the fact every response you gave to the things he said was a non-argument, laced together with you being comically full of yourself.
Nah, you’re not interesting enough to do anything with except to mock. Believe it or not, I’m an actual person and not an ideological simulacrum. If you’re willing to take a leap, I even have a bit of my writing full of real *substance* up on this account. But baby steps eh?
I hope the time you wasted getting mad at me was worth it. I had fun but this exchange is getting pretty boring now. Be on your way, stranger.
This has to be the sixth post or so where you've just kind of written the same thing on the right as a concept. I agree some of the specific accounts you've pointed out do not make much sense do not make much sense. I just wonder why you spend time engaging with them? There's a lot better stuff to talk about.
I can think of some arguments that lean right at places like Compact Magazine, The Free Press, Commonplace, American Affairs, etc for people to read and debate. I might be partial because I've met and talked with various people who write at these outlets. But if you mostly focus on annoying and lazy commentators who go viral on social media for your seventh declaration of the postmodern right, well ... ask not for whom Pavlov's bell rings, it rings for thee!
There are more intellectual conservatives. But the main portion of the right is no longer composed of the sorts of people who value institutions and read Burke.
Ultimately, I often write about stuff that annoys me. This is one such case.
I don't even mean grand intellectuals, just people throwing around policy ideas. For example, I think high tariff rates are a bad idea. But they have been discussed in all sorts of GOP staffer-adjacent outlets for a few years prior this admin. The tariffs were one of my big concerns going into this year, because I knew many staffers sincerely believed in them and Trump likes them.
I also know of non-GOP people really excited about carbon tariffs, which has a little effect on my Dem admin counterfactual thinking too. This is both very relevant to effectively improving global wellbeing and has basically nothing to do with postmodernism or right-wing shitposter accounts. I'm surprised you haven't written more about tariffs as a result. It seems like declining trade with developing South Asian countries could outpace PEPFAR in harms, as much as I agree with you gutting PEPFAR is a big mistake.
But this post isn't even about the orange man. Those posts are more interesting! It's about two pseudo accounts that I already know aren't interesting to argue with.
Is it "postmodern" to respond to "you are evil if you don't do X" with "yes, I am evil and will not be doing X"?
It doesn't seem like many of the people you quote here are even bothering to pretend to try to say that their ideology is anything more than this. You can get angry at the "evil", but don't frame it as proceduralist!
I think there's an implicit kind of moral nihilism associated with the "yeah, I'm evil, so what?" attitude that goes unexamined - and I'm quite sure that they aren't prepared at all to offer arguments in support of that position.
Yup. These arguments claim it is good to cause greater suffering of foreigners, which I disagree with and believe is wrong. But it is not obviously postmodern, and most examples of postmodernism cited by older conservative critics are often just modern arguments for nihilism.
You can frame stopping foreign aid as a causing greater suffering to foreigners. It is also a very incomplete picture of what is happening.
For instance, is the money either being turned to ash or being sent to South Asia? Obviously it is being spent somewhere else for a different purpose. So the analysis is now a question of whether the alternative use for it is the better use for it.
So the main arguments I've heard on the program largely discussed here (PEPFAR) are 1) 21 abortions occurred in violation of PEPFAR funding rules and 2) that we need to save money on the budget. The former is a bad trade-off by basically any ethical standard assuming abortion is definitely the conscious murder of a human being, which not everyone is of course agreeing on.
The latter is also a poor argument. It is not a lot of money when we all know boomers demanding additional new healthcare services is the main thing (and some useful idiots arguing it is deeply ethically important we give seniors and healthcare lobbyists money or else poverty will result) blowing up the budget. Oh and Medicaid matching funds give billions to rich states like New York to pay people for sitting around with their parents. You know, things obviously morally leaps and bounds better than foreign aid.
Then you have the sickos on the internet who like poor Africans getting sick and dying. That's very obviously the main post by an internet pseudo this post is criticizing, and then some pointless debate about whether EAs are stupid that goes nowhere. But I'm open to reading a thoughtful critique of PEPFAR if you have a link. Maybe the other programs suck in USAID so much that it justifies gutting PEPFAR at the same time. Once again, please share a link if you have that argument and I'll read it!
By this description of use of money, we should defund medicaid/medicare and send it overseas instead because the amount of human lives being saved/suffering stopped in countries where dollars go farther is a better use of it? If we are going to argue the steelman abortion case where trading 21 lives for the lives saved by PEPFAR is justified, why not argue this case on defunding US Entitlements? At least defund it to the point where the marginal utility of dollars is more equal, right?
No, we're a republic. We are going to spend on the poor citizens who elect people to government in popular elections by orders of magnitude over foreigners we do not have immediate ties to.
But the question is on the margin, and simply put, the deficit margin is the overwhelmingly the further growth of the healthcare state, often splashing all kinds of money on propertied middle class Americans and even richer people. If we fix that problem, we can avoid hiking taxes on future Americans. If slashing PEPFAR solved this problem, I might be in a real conundrum, but of course its total historical cost is orders of magnitude smaller than the annual Medicare growth we're projecting over the coming decades.
I would like to applaud the Democrats for lying to their younger voters on the biggest question of government, they've done a fine political job and Republicans have clearly learned from them on this topic. But the small problem is it is making our entire country stupider and in more debt so people can procure brand new medical procedures with money they don't have and yell murder when anyone of significance complains.
EDIT: Fixed some typos, sorry if that's misleading.
The thinking behind this article is why the pre-Trump right and "conservatives" have failed to accomplish anything in the last 80 years. The woke left didn't win by winning rhetorical arguments in high school debate club, they won by simply taking power and using it. Now the right is escalating appropriately.
The real issue is that moderate liberals are incredibly stupid, and cannot apply the friend-enemy distinction to understand that radical leftists are their enemy. They fail to understand that their only friends are moderate conservatives and have ceded all initiative to the radical left.
Ultimately, there are no passionate moderates left among the youth, who actually drive political change, so we will continue to seesaw between the hard left and hard right until one side ultimately wins.
This goes all over, but it is an interesting topic.
Disregarding bad actors, I think the important part here is that there was an assumption of shared values, and that has gradually gone away. We could call those shared values "modern" and "postmodern" people don't bother trying to play into the modern frame.
It will just become rhetorical games at that point. Internet arguments and arguments from politicians will inevitably be more about rhetoric than substance anyways, so I wouldn't put too much expectation on it. It isn't like I was getting some sort of dialectic or good-faith analysis when I heard any policies discussed about Covid, Ukraine, or Israel during the Biden admin, so I'm not really shocked that Vance or Hegseth are similarly going to not play that game either. I
also understand that is me using rhetorical play to make that very point. I would argue the essence of these people and places for conversation is rhetoric over logic.
I guess it depends on where you go from there. But I have gradually drifted into being "postmodern" myself as I am fairly dissatisfied with what modernity has brought me. When you break down values to the point where you don't hold the same ones the other person holds, where do you go?
I lost my liberal expectations of norms for civil government after Covid, Russia, and Trump hysteria. Arguing with me on what norms I am supposed to respect after all of that seems like I am talking to a dishonest actor that only cares about those norms when their opposition does it.
I used to take slippery slope fallacies at their face and determine that just because one policy is out there, it doesn't mean it has to go further. I saw the trans kid stuff on the horizon in 2018 and was assured that was just crazy Internet activists by progressive friends. Two years later I'm cancelled by those same friends for not going with the flow on it.
I used to hold strong liberal views on race until I realized that only white people seemed to be the only people that are liberal about race. Every other race seemed more than happy to have in-group preference and identity. This became abundantly clear after 2020. Am I supposed to unlearn that and go back to being a white person that doesn't see color when I know everyone else does? I know the alternative progressive answer is that I am supposed to see color and atone for my sins of being white as my white identity is only good for being a mark of shame and derision. Not my cup of tea tbh.
Probably the nail in the coffin was religion. I realized that secularism is kind of bullshit. Everyone is religious as everyone has moral values that they think should guide society. I went from there to seeing liberal secularism as a kind of anti-religion-religion. What is a liberal secular leader guiding themselves with? Liberal secular religious morals of materialism, utilitarianism, etc. Are those my principles? Not really. So why should I hold their principles as my own or even defend them? They seem keen on ensuring my own are never considered seriously.
This kind of stuff has killed my liberalism and, as I think liberalism is interchangeable with modernity, is what makes me post-modern. So talking to someone about the specifics of the federal government funding USAID seems goofy. What part of foreign aid is part of my values? Being a heckin good person is code for being a good liberal, which I am not. Why should I care leftists crowing about free speech when I listened to them for almost a decade now talk about how it is a bad thing? It sounds like a mercenary attitude to a principle they don't really care about unless it affects them [I remember all of the times I was ignored and derided on this during the last four years and every time I consoled myself by saying "I suppose when my guy is in power I won't give a shit what these people say"].
This gets back to the initial point. When you just don't have the same values, it is not really a conversation anymore. It is rhetorical games. Which is most sharply manifested by Internet and political arguments. That said, if you want a serious conversation on serious political topics issues, I'd recommend don't look up soundbites of Presidents and don't argue with Twitter anons. I like those conversations myself.
I mean yes, propagandists do propaganda. That’s what these types of accounts are. Like the “Evan loves warf” account and “brooklyn dad” are propaganda accounts. they post dunks, quips, etc. it’s rhetorically powerful and persuasive. The bitter poison the philosopher must swallow is that these tactics are politically superior to your style: trying to engage in genuine good faith arguments. Your role, if you want to leave political impacts, is for you to be the think piece that these propaganda accounts read so they can regurgitate your ideologies in similar quippy dunks. Find this frustrating? Well, this is a “fact” that doesn’t care about philosopher’s “feelings.” Dawkins will always be more influential than Oppy
They're all also massive, massive babies. Just fucking whining about everything, all the while accusing others of being childish. It's really something to behold.
You get that this is a dunk right?
Nah, a dunk is when is being clever or at least thinks they're being clever. I'm just directly insulting these types as being huge fucking babies.
Now your comment, on the other hand, is an attempted dunk, but it's dumb, so it's not.
Yeah, a case school is JD Vance blaming Europe to not have stopped the US to invade Iraq. Good to know man, next time we’ll send Luftwaffe to bomb the Pentagon and the White House. Don’t you know Germany has recently reformed her budget laws to spend illimited money for the army?
Sai is a woman.
The rhetoric-not-arguments thing is real, amd not limited to the online right. I suspect it developed as a defense against argumentum ad racism, where online arguments were chiefly used as a technique for finding some specious grounds to rule one's interlocutor unfit to be tolerated, rather than finding truth. Regardless, we are all poorer for this development.
At least there are holdouts. EAs and neolibs have always been pathologically rational-argumentative, and the right has its spreadsheet racists.
Thanks
I can feel the anger radiating off this post.
Waaaaa I have political opponents waaaaa waaaa I don’t like their opinions waaaaa they should justify and explain their beliefs to me constantly waaaaa
Does anyone else remember about ten years ago, when all the most annoying people in the world would constantly tell you that it "wasn't their job to educate you"? Funny how things change.
Theres a lot of comments suggesting that this article relies on a bastardization of postmodernism. I don’t think that’s the case:
Postmodernism just refers to an incredulity towards meta-narratives (this is the standard definition offered by Lyotard in “The Postmodern Condition). And I think this is entirely true of many conservatives nowadays — it’s really difficult to identify any cohesive meta-narrative undergirding their thought.
We might suspect they have one along the lines of “the elites are bad and we need to fight to uphold our values”, but as Matthew (rightly) points out, their behavior is so often antithetical to this. They idolize a billionaire and, quite frequently, implode efforts to upend elitism (e.g. slashing welfare programs, lowering taxes for the rich, etc.). You might alternatively think it’s just a matter of pledging loyalty to Trump (this actually seems right), but that doesn’t constitute a meta-narrative considering that Trump is just a blip in history. So, either way, there’s a clear incredulity towards meta-narratives — they reject any principled ideologies governing how to view the progression of thought throughout history.
TLDR: The right no longer has a cohesive ideology. It’s just a club with loyalty signaling (without any consistent principles to which loyalty is pledged), and that certainly qualifies as a kind of postmodernism, even by the classical definition.
"No longer has a cohesive ideology."
Sounds like big tent coalitional contradictions, which you see on the other side too. Pluralism in action.
I don’t think any reasonable person is claiming that there aren’t people on the left who fit the description. The difference is that it appears much much more common on the right, and more importantly, the people on the right who are like this also happen to be the ones holding office and controlling significant power in the Republican Party (whereas among democrats, they tend to be very fringe figures who don’t have all that much influence). You cannot tell me that the left—particularly the leading figures—are as rife with inconsistency as the right.
I speculate that we will soon reach the Rightoid Singularity, where the elapsed time between consecutive Twitter deportation threats approaches zero.
The arguments against sending money to Africa are extremely simple and obvious. I wrote a post on the subject. Of course, the whole thing boils down to one's priors. From what I've seen, you never attempt to engage seriously with the differing priors of people who don't share your worldview. Instead, you write something like this generalizing them all as evilmeanbadstupid. In that sense, you are guilty of "dunking" just like the people you are criticizing.
What are the extremely simple and obvious arguments to which you refer?
https://persononline.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-give-to-charity
Your argument is valid in the sense that “I don’t give to charity” logically follows from “I assign zero moral weight to people I don’t know.” Questioning the premise is pretty easy though. The standard argument is something like ten dollars makes no difference to me, but could, with some probability, save the life of some other person. If the situation were reversed, I’d appreciate that quite a bit, especially if that person were my child. That’s why I give to charity.
You seem to entirely accept the utilitarian framework, and just have a very sharp cutoff for your utility function. I’m not sure it’s immoral, exactly, just uncharitable in every sense.
It's not necessarily that I assign zero value to people I don't know, it's more that we're working with levels of uncertainty that are impossible to resolve in any sensible fashion. You give the example of "ten dollars makes no difference to me but could save the life of some other person." Okay, so I give ten dollars out to whoever or whatever that is. But I have a lot more than ten dollars in my bank account. If every $10 that I give away saves a life, and $10 "makes no difference to me," should I not keep giving out $10, over and over, until all of a sudden I've given away much more than $10 and the amount suddenly makes quite a big difference to me?
People with your viewpoint, IME, never attempt to actually square this circle. Instead you just keep it at this vague level of abstraction as if the formula for how much money "saves a life" and how much of it you should give away and when is really intuitive and obvious and known by everyone.
But this is interesting, because you basically agree with my premise, that 10 dollars to me is not all that useful, but very useful to someone else. If we agree on this, we’re basically talking terms then. How much does one give? Just the ten? More? I argue, and I think you’d agree, ten is better than zero.
Your example of infinitely giving ten dollars isn’t a strawman, because this is literally what Peter Singer argues. Personally I don’t bother trying to optimize much, I just set the amount I give at some value I won’t really notice in my paycheck. I think it’s like $100/month?
It sounds like your objection is more to the OBLIGATION than the actual charity itself, is that correct?
Well, the core of my objection is that I have a wife and a kid, and further than that, I have siblings and cousins and all the rest of it. If I'm going to earmark money for anyone that isn't me, the wife and kid rank far, far above anyone else, and then even after them, my other family members and direct community are another immeasurable distance above random people in Africa.
So you're looking at a model where the weighting of where my money goes is something unfathomable like x500000000 towards wife and kid, and x0.0000001 to random Africans. In this sense I don't technically assign literally zero weight to the random Africans, but in practice, they're never getting any of my money. And of course these figures are just totally made up for the sake of example as it's a bit silly to try and truly quantify these things to begin with. My duty to my wife and kid simply takes absolute precedence over the concerns of strangers on another continent.
If you legitimately view yourself as an atomized individual with absolutely no duty or concern towards anyone in particular, then the EA model of giving all your money to Africa makes a bit more sense. But that view of human existence is nonsensical to me.
The uncertainty argument is a fairly well known flaw where it is said just because there is a continuum with blurry lines demarcating concepts, that the concepts are nonsensical. An illustrative example is a beard, where one hair in your face definitely is not a beard, nor is two, or five. It's unclear the exact number of hairs at which point it becomes a beard, but that doesn't mean beards do not exist.
I think you understand this because you said in the article that you do in fact give to the church, where the same uncertainty applies. Jesus never said the exact figure that one is supposed to give. The extra 10 dollars of alms will make more difference to the needy than you repeatedly, if there's no limiting factor, it follows giving to the church is wrong also.
By giving to the church despite the present uncertainty, you seem to acknowledge that one doesn't need to know the exact point where it becomes "going the extra mile" in order to do some of it.
Marginal utility
I may be using the terms wrong—can you elaborate?
Oh, when you mentioned that $10 to you isn't as important as to a poor child who is starving. Maybe I'm using it wrong? My understanding is that marginal utility is when there is a change in the utility in the next "amount" of a thing. So, for you, the next $10 isn't as important as the previous ones, since you're likely quite comfortable, but for a poor child, the next $10 is very important. I was just referencing a term I believed fit your thought process.
Agreed at the end of the day it’s about first principles and ultimately whose first principles are in accordance with reality and truth. Everything else is just begging the question
A lot of these online rightist types are going to be very disappointed when they find out that "The Based Ritual," as Hanania calls it, will never work on regular, well-adjusted people, and they will rightly find anyone who engages in it disgusting.
In reality, regular, well adjusted people are hostages to extremists. Otherwise we would never see extremists drive large social change.
It worked on me and I used to be a socialist. Maybe you’re just… gay? Homosexual? Maybe. As it stands this hypothesis remains unchallenged.
> I used to be a socialist.
I said regular, well-adjusted people.
New evidence only bolsters my theory
Which theory? The theory that people who don't follow the Based Ritual are gay, or the theory that, because you personally started following it, that proves that all normal, well-adjusted people will be convinced to become rightoids just because some losers respond "based" to any dumb rightoid opinion they hear? If it's the former, I'd like to hear how being anti-socialist is gay, and if it's the latter, I'd like to see what sort of mental gymnastics you can use to justify it. I'm sure it will be entertaining either way.
Man, I'm often unconvinced by your philosophical arguments - anthropic, psycho-physical or otherwise -, but at least I'll readily admit that they *are* arguments, developed in full depth, and worthy of intellectual engagement if one has the time and inclination.
What I'm wondering here is, why do you bother to argue random vibes with these people who are not even producing or discussing arguments? And then share it with your subscribers?
Yeah I think pretty much every EA argument is terrible but I suppose it’s commendable they argue. Dunking on RW twitter seems silly though because a rw could easily say the exact same on progressive twitter. The ultimate question is really who is correct
These people are trolls. Whether they think of themselves as such is irrelevant. Do not feed the trolls
Aw sweetheart.. I already told you that you shouldn’t feel bad about that exchange. We all do it sometimes. You gave me a good chuckle, isn’t that enough? I know it stung, but that’s just what happens when you play outside your kiddie pool rationalist comfort zone. This post was completely unnecessary.
I see that you still haven’t actually digested what I said. There was no snark in it, if you can believe it. You hug your ego so damn tight that you’re suffocating it to death. Let go of it and for once, think like a person, my dear bugman. Like I said already, I believe in you. You can break out of it.
Your comment has many words but literally nothing of substance. Peak example of what I discuss in this article.
Seriously, what did they do to you? My god.. it’s like you’re pretending to not even be a person anymore, but just a filling cabinet of arguments.
Lol
I can't help but wonder - did you write this with the *intention* of proving him right, or did you do it accidentally?
I don’t care whether he’s right or wrong. I am trying to teach him that most of the world doesn’t either. Whimpering “but I am right! I am sooo right!” to himself will not win him any arguments outside the rationalist kiddie pool. Worry not, I can and do get in that pool sometimes. It can make for good practice, but one must actually apply it outside for it to matter at all.
Do any of you rats understand metaphors? Or do they cut that faculty out of your brains at the entryway? As much as I enjoy competition, this isn’t a pissing contest for me. So, if you’d be kind enough to go point that wretched thing at someone else I’d be very grateful.
I apologize, I should have been more clear! It was a rhetorical question. Please, feel no need to answer it.
I thought you didn’t like using rhetoric to make a point. Wasn’t that your point in the first place?
I’m not driven by need these days, I’ve found my *want*
As you would say, sounds like he struck a nerve.
Nah. You might say it, and you’re welcome to. Fact is that we had the exact same exchange last year and the lad has seemingly learned nothing at all since then. He’s actually walked a few steps backward. There’s a reason he knew I’m friends with the infamous Walt. Although even there, dude forgot that I’m a woman.
The problem here is that you think the fact he hasn't accepted your non-arguments is proof that he hasn't learned something that he should've. He hasn't learned anything from you because you have nothing to teach. Well, except as a case study of the pathologies of the online right, which Matthew has evidently learned a lot about.
Who told you I am on the right? I am not even online half the time and I prefer it that way.
You trust the word of someone that self-evidently has no idea what he’s talking about or even whom he’s talking about. Willful ignorance is not a pretty thing to prance about in, but you do you.
So no objection to the rest of my comment, then? Just latching onto one word that you dispute? Won't change the fact every response you gave to the things he said was a non-argument, laced together with you being comically full of yourself.
Nah, you’re not interesting enough to do anything with except to mock. Believe it or not, I’m an actual person and not an ideological simulacrum. If you’re willing to take a leap, I even have a bit of my writing full of real *substance* up on this account. But baby steps eh?
I hope the time you wasted getting mad at me was worth it. I had fun but this exchange is getting pretty boring now. Be on your way, stranger.
Didn't know you decided to become a full on leftist, given that you can't seem to tell who is a girl and who is a boy.
This has to be the sixth post or so where you've just kind of written the same thing on the right as a concept. I agree some of the specific accounts you've pointed out do not make much sense do not make much sense. I just wonder why you spend time engaging with them? There's a lot better stuff to talk about.
I can think of some arguments that lean right at places like Compact Magazine, The Free Press, Commonplace, American Affairs, etc for people to read and debate. I might be partial because I've met and talked with various people who write at these outlets. But if you mostly focus on annoying and lazy commentators who go viral on social media for your seventh declaration of the postmodern right, well ... ask not for whom Pavlov's bell rings, it rings for thee!
There are more intellectual conservatives. But the main portion of the right is no longer composed of the sorts of people who value institutions and read Burke.
Ultimately, I often write about stuff that annoys me. This is one such case.
I don't even mean grand intellectuals, just people throwing around policy ideas. For example, I think high tariff rates are a bad idea. But they have been discussed in all sorts of GOP staffer-adjacent outlets for a few years prior this admin. The tariffs were one of my big concerns going into this year, because I knew many staffers sincerely believed in them and Trump likes them.
I also know of non-GOP people really excited about carbon tariffs, which has a little effect on my Dem admin counterfactual thinking too. This is both very relevant to effectively improving global wellbeing and has basically nothing to do with postmodernism or right-wing shitposter accounts. I'm surprised you haven't written more about tariffs as a result. It seems like declining trade with developing South Asian countries could outpace PEPFAR in harms, as much as I agree with you gutting PEPFAR is a big mistake.
The "orange man bad" posting will continue until the orange man stops being bad.
But this post isn't even about the orange man. Those posts are more interesting! It's about two pseudo accounts that I already know aren't interesting to argue with.
Is it "postmodern" to respond to "you are evil if you don't do X" with "yes, I am evil and will not be doing X"?
It doesn't seem like many of the people you quote here are even bothering to pretend to try to say that their ideology is anything more than this. You can get angry at the "evil", but don't frame it as proceduralist!
I think there's an implicit kind of moral nihilism associated with the "yeah, I'm evil, so what?" attitude that goes unexamined - and I'm quite sure that they aren't prepared at all to offer arguments in support of that position.
Yup. These arguments claim it is good to cause greater suffering of foreigners, which I disagree with and believe is wrong. But it is not obviously postmodern, and most examples of postmodernism cited by older conservative critics are often just modern arguments for nihilism.
You can frame stopping foreign aid as a causing greater suffering to foreigners. It is also a very incomplete picture of what is happening.
For instance, is the money either being turned to ash or being sent to South Asia? Obviously it is being spent somewhere else for a different purpose. So the analysis is now a question of whether the alternative use for it is the better use for it.
So the main arguments I've heard on the program largely discussed here (PEPFAR) are 1) 21 abortions occurred in violation of PEPFAR funding rules and 2) that we need to save money on the budget. The former is a bad trade-off by basically any ethical standard assuming abortion is definitely the conscious murder of a human being, which not everyone is of course agreeing on.
The latter is also a poor argument. It is not a lot of money when we all know boomers demanding additional new healthcare services is the main thing (and some useful idiots arguing it is deeply ethically important we give seniors and healthcare lobbyists money or else poverty will result) blowing up the budget. Oh and Medicaid matching funds give billions to rich states like New York to pay people for sitting around with their parents. You know, things obviously morally leaps and bounds better than foreign aid.
Then you have the sickos on the internet who like poor Africans getting sick and dying. That's very obviously the main post by an internet pseudo this post is criticizing, and then some pointless debate about whether EAs are stupid that goes nowhere. But I'm open to reading a thoughtful critique of PEPFAR if you have a link. Maybe the other programs suck in USAID so much that it justifies gutting PEPFAR at the same time. Once again, please share a link if you have that argument and I'll read it!
By this description of use of money, we should defund medicaid/medicare and send it overseas instead because the amount of human lives being saved/suffering stopped in countries where dollars go farther is a better use of it? If we are going to argue the steelman abortion case where trading 21 lives for the lives saved by PEPFAR is justified, why not argue this case on defunding US Entitlements? At least defund it to the point where the marginal utility of dollars is more equal, right?
No, we're a republic. We are going to spend on the poor citizens who elect people to government in popular elections by orders of magnitude over foreigners we do not have immediate ties to.
But the question is on the margin, and simply put, the deficit margin is the overwhelmingly the further growth of the healthcare state, often splashing all kinds of money on propertied middle class Americans and even richer people. If we fix that problem, we can avoid hiking taxes on future Americans. If slashing PEPFAR solved this problem, I might be in a real conundrum, but of course its total historical cost is orders of magnitude smaller than the annual Medicare growth we're projecting over the coming decades.
I would like to applaud the Democrats for lying to their younger voters on the biggest question of government, they've done a fine political job and Republicans have clearly learned from them on this topic. But the small problem is it is making our entire country stupider and in more debt so people can procure brand new medical procedures with money they don't have and yell murder when anyone of significance complains.
EDIT: Fixed some typos, sorry if that's misleading.
It certainly is postmodern (as used colloquially) to accept having an evil ideology because vibes.
Do you know what postmodern means?
Depends what context the term is being used. Art, different schools of philosophy, history, all have different uses for the term.
Obviously the online use of 'postmodern' isn't historically accurate.
What moral framework do you have?
The thinking behind this article is why the pre-Trump right and "conservatives" have failed to accomplish anything in the last 80 years. The woke left didn't win by winning rhetorical arguments in high school debate club, they won by simply taking power and using it. Now the right is escalating appropriately.
The real issue is that moderate liberals are incredibly stupid, and cannot apply the friend-enemy distinction to understand that radical leftists are their enemy. They fail to understand that their only friends are moderate conservatives and have ceded all initiative to the radical left.
Case in point, just today, David Hogg announced he's going to be primarying moderate Dems who in his words, are "ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel" (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/david-hogg-run-group-announces-20m-initiative-support/story?id=120861846).
Ultimately, there are no passionate moderates left among the youth, who actually drive political change, so we will continue to seesaw between the hard left and hard right until one side ultimately wins.
This goes all over, but it is an interesting topic.
Disregarding bad actors, I think the important part here is that there was an assumption of shared values, and that has gradually gone away. We could call those shared values "modern" and "postmodern" people don't bother trying to play into the modern frame.
It will just become rhetorical games at that point. Internet arguments and arguments from politicians will inevitably be more about rhetoric than substance anyways, so I wouldn't put too much expectation on it. It isn't like I was getting some sort of dialectic or good-faith analysis when I heard any policies discussed about Covid, Ukraine, or Israel during the Biden admin, so I'm not really shocked that Vance or Hegseth are similarly going to not play that game either. I
also understand that is me using rhetorical play to make that very point. I would argue the essence of these people and places for conversation is rhetoric over logic.
I guess it depends on where you go from there. But I have gradually drifted into being "postmodern" myself as I am fairly dissatisfied with what modernity has brought me. When you break down values to the point where you don't hold the same ones the other person holds, where do you go?
I lost my liberal expectations of norms for civil government after Covid, Russia, and Trump hysteria. Arguing with me on what norms I am supposed to respect after all of that seems like I am talking to a dishonest actor that only cares about those norms when their opposition does it.
I used to take slippery slope fallacies at their face and determine that just because one policy is out there, it doesn't mean it has to go further. I saw the trans kid stuff on the horizon in 2018 and was assured that was just crazy Internet activists by progressive friends. Two years later I'm cancelled by those same friends for not going with the flow on it.
I used to hold strong liberal views on race until I realized that only white people seemed to be the only people that are liberal about race. Every other race seemed more than happy to have in-group preference and identity. This became abundantly clear after 2020. Am I supposed to unlearn that and go back to being a white person that doesn't see color when I know everyone else does? I know the alternative progressive answer is that I am supposed to see color and atone for my sins of being white as my white identity is only good for being a mark of shame and derision. Not my cup of tea tbh.
Probably the nail in the coffin was religion. I realized that secularism is kind of bullshit. Everyone is religious as everyone has moral values that they think should guide society. I went from there to seeing liberal secularism as a kind of anti-religion-religion. What is a liberal secular leader guiding themselves with? Liberal secular religious morals of materialism, utilitarianism, etc. Are those my principles? Not really. So why should I hold their principles as my own or even defend them? They seem keen on ensuring my own are never considered seriously.
This kind of stuff has killed my liberalism and, as I think liberalism is interchangeable with modernity, is what makes me post-modern. So talking to someone about the specifics of the federal government funding USAID seems goofy. What part of foreign aid is part of my values? Being a heckin good person is code for being a good liberal, which I am not. Why should I care leftists crowing about free speech when I listened to them for almost a decade now talk about how it is a bad thing? It sounds like a mercenary attitude to a principle they don't really care about unless it affects them [I remember all of the times I was ignored and derided on this during the last four years and every time I consoled myself by saying "I suppose when my guy is in power I won't give a shit what these people say"].
This gets back to the initial point. When you just don't have the same values, it is not really a conversation anymore. It is rhetorical games. Which is most sharply manifested by Internet and political arguments. That said, if you want a serious conversation on serious political topics issues, I'd recommend don't look up soundbites of Presidents and don't argue with Twitter anons. I like those conversations myself.
Bravo! Thank you.
I mean yes, propagandists do propaganda. That’s what these types of accounts are. Like the “Evan loves warf” account and “brooklyn dad” are propaganda accounts. they post dunks, quips, etc. it’s rhetorically powerful and persuasive. The bitter poison the philosopher must swallow is that these tactics are politically superior to your style: trying to engage in genuine good faith arguments. Your role, if you want to leave political impacts, is for you to be the think piece that these propaganda accounts read so they can regurgitate your ideologies in similar quippy dunks. Find this frustrating? Well, this is a “fact” that doesn’t care about philosopher’s “feelings.” Dawkins will always be more influential than Oppy