One of the examples here strikes a parallel with the US government's
"Enhanced Interrogation" used as a euphemism for torture starting during the bush years.
Straight from the Nazi playbook:
"Verschärfte Vernehmung ("intensified interrogation"): torture"
Not entirely correct, I'm afraid. Concentration camps were inaugurated by the Spanish and popularized by the British. Co-location of killing facilities and camps was not a common occurrence even in Germany, so there were many more concentration camps than death camps.
> Everyday political talk rejects the language of universality in favor of the idioms of affinity. To call a candidate or policy based or cringe, pilled or normie—terms without a fixed meaning even for those who invoke them—is to situate oneself in a particular group against an ill-defined mainstream.
so too does this apply to “elite”, but the essay uses it liberally and a fun exercise is to try and replace each occurrence with its “plain” equivalent.
> Obscurity impedes solidarity.
don’t reveal your answer to the above exercise. if we do, we’ll discover that we’re all reading slightly different details into the text, and that may put us in conflict. you and i can be in solidarity against the “elites” only because of our differences which this term serves to obscure.
> To write plainly (and read texts with the expectation of plainness) was to make information meaningful and persuasion possible.
persuasion is about selling an image. information serves only to constrain the image. rarely do they work hand-in-hand.
I very much agree with a lot of the conclusions. But the descriptions of experience, such as education just serving individual students whims, as opposed to providing rigorous knowledge of topics, I find completely counter to my personal experience.
I went to university during the era or the writings, early 1980s. My course work in electrical engineering was very techincally rigorous. i got no credit for "radio programs", or anything like that.
Even the few humanities electives I was reequired to take (I chose "History of Eastern Religions", "Survey of Art History", among others) where difficult courses requireing ressearch and informed writing.
I consider myself very left aligned politically, but I do agree on the distruction currently being caused by DEI policies.
The modern idea that one primarily needs to affiliate with a specific identity, this being practiced both among the wing-nuts and the woke-nuts, does appear very present, salient and central to the disintegration described as "the reign of universal ignorance" in the article.
I graduated in the early 2010s and mostly studying philosophy and gender studies. In my experience of that time period, these too were difficult courses requiring research and informed writing. Certainly, doing well at school required knowing the material and having something to say.
I mean, it has definitive flaws. Like convoluted rules that lead to capture by minority. And that minority is able tweak the rules further so that they need less and less votes to win more and more power.
From wikipedia's Christopher Lasch entry, here is a quote from his:
```
A feminist movement that respected the achievements of women in the past would not disparage housework, motherhood or unpaid civic and neighborly services. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment. ... It would insist that people need self-respecting honorable callings, not glamorous careers that carry high salaries but take them away from their families
```
This is very dishonest to me it seems to weaponize an existential seemingly anticapitalist critique ("The goal of life is not to accumulate money but to answer a calling) against feminism. Feminists were not disparaging motherhood or unpaid work like if it was above them to do it. They criticized the fact that it was considered their work and had indeed no opportunity for other callings
That's not even an interesting angle of attack against capitalism because it tells you capitalism is only about people trying to get richer. Sigh, I'll pass.
Addendum: This seems to fit "Romantic anticapitalism" as defined by Michael Löwy. He had some interesting takes about it IIRC.
The poverty at the time was actual real world issue women faced. The honorable calling does not pay the bills and does not allow you to escape the abusive partner.
It is that sleight of hand where they pretend to be oh so caring about women while completely ignoring pretty large issues. And where they pretend to value housework and what not while consistently treating women living those values as stupider.
I will support feminism when feminists protest against male only military conscription in Ukraine. Until then it's just one of "we only care about our own kind of people" movement like white supremacy or black lives matter. If you believe in sending men literally to their death while staying safe yourself, you should be at least willing to do some house work in return. Personally I think nobody should be forced to fight a war and everyone should be able to volunteer, and countries that can't find enough volunteers do not deserve to exist. Pretty sure there will be more men fighting in practice, but if that's by choice, it's not an injustice.
So why should I be forced to participate if I didn't perpetuate any violence myself? Should immigrants from countries known for terrorism or drag cartels be banned because Americans want no part of these activities?
> Feminists were not disparaging motherhood or unpaid work like if it was above them to do it.
Were? When are we talking about? This sounds like Lasch, in the 90s or maybe 80s, comparing 3rd wave feminism to 2nd wave feminism. However, now it sounds like he's critiquing 4th wave feminism, which is significantly more debased. I think you are talking past him either way, but it helps to be specific. Ultimately, your claims aren't contradicting his in my view.
Yes. The biggest problem we face here is cartel violence which isn't caused by democracy at all, but rather by political corruption, which is only possible due to an extreme power imbalance. If anything, we need more democracy, specifically more accountability against corruption.
Back when we were a "perfect dicatorship", government repression was even worse, as shown by the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, but this information was censored by the government and even today we don't have the full list of victims.
There's no reason to believe that going back to that system would make the country safer. On the contrary, the rules would most likely be allied with the cartels just like they are now but with no opposition to expose their abuses.
This, of course, creates a kind of dilemma: in a liberal democracy you are allowed to expose and criticize the flaws of the system while the alternatives limit the flow of that information, so you end up in this situation when people compare the idealized propaganda of a non-democratic regime with the hypercritical journalism of liberal democracies and conclude that the latter are worse.
Government is a thing that forces everyone to follow their rules. You can’t opt in or opt out. On face value that’s extremely coercive and bad.
I think of democracy as a “good idea” being not necessarily about being the system that delivers the best governance outcomes, but rather about providing some measure of legitimacy for the coercion inherent to government.
Phrased another way, the strength of democratic systems is that they reduce the tail risk of extremely negative governance outcomes, not that they improve the expectation of overall governance outcomes.
Many people believe that every human is essentially equal to every other and has an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that a government that represents the will of the people, even imperfectly, is preferable to a dictatorship.
I don't know why you would say we're all supposed to love democracy "by default" as if there weren't centuries of history, philosophy and bloody conflict behind that point of view.
Americans, despite their bellyaching, live in a democractic republic and can afford to indulge in romantic fantasies about benevolent dictatorships (as they often do about civil war and revolution,) while remaining safe from (edit:likely) ever having suffer their consequences. People who have actually lived under dictatorships, meanwhile, very rarely seem to recommend it over democracy.
Yes democracy is a good idea. The idea that the people govern themselves.
Now we can discuss how well the so called democracies of our time implement the idea. For example, the pavlovian association of election = democracies has always left me perplexed.
Democracy is a system of government, not an economic model. You could easily argue, simultaneously:
1. Capitalism has failed in those countries, even if in different times and places one could say capitalism has succeeded
2. India and Mexico have major issues with their democracies—if a democracy is a system of government in which the citizens of a state hold collective power over their government, then there are many obstacles preventing either country from having a well-functioning democracy.
I can sympathise with your feelings that the current global status-quo is failing many people—I would agree—and I would argue India and Mexico are great examples of how unchecked capitalism and authoritarianism are causing an active erosion of democracy (and standard of living) in those two countries.
> Democracy is a system of government, not an economic model.
For the longest time, "Democracy" the political system was bandied about to be the primary precondition for economic progress.
The thinking was, that when people (countries) have democracy this somehow "empowers" them to become economically successful.
This reasoning was fairly prevalent, after all, the U.S., the showcase of democracy, was such an economic powerhouse. Worth noting as well is that democracy was normally peddled with economic liberalization, free trade, etc.
After China's rise however, the idea that democracy is a necessary for economic prosperity has more or less been debunked. China has demonstrated that democracy is not a precondition for economic prosperity.
Now, developing countries are faced with the question, what political model should be followed? If economic prosperity is the objective, the Chinese model seems to be promising. On the other hand, what does democracy have to offer? Looking at the U.S. as the showcase of democracy, what does the U.S. have that a developing country would find worth emulating?
> For the longest time, "Democracy" the political system was bandied about to be the primary precondition for economic progress.
I agree with you. I think that mindset has a fundamental misunderstanding of the root cause of economic prosperity.
Economic prosperity comes from liberty. Democracy and liberty are two very different things. For a long time, they were treated as roughly equivalent.
China figured out that economic liberty, coupled with state sponsored abusive labor conditions and few ecological restrictions, can effectively compete with "democracy" where people are able to vote to regulate labor markets.
In the face of this, Democracy is a weakness. After all, how can a Western economy that's voting itself (for example) four day work weeks and great work/life balance benefits compete with forced labor in the short term?
I think it competes well in the medium to long term, as economic systems that maximize liberty seem to mostly win.
China can compete in this method because they have 4 times the population of the US. And even so in aggregate they are still clearly in 2nd in the global hard power race.
Scarily for china their demographics look horrific through the rest of the century while America will likely continue growing due to immigration. By 2100 it's projected they could have less than twice the population of the US. Will they still be competitive then? Will any of the asian tigers besides Japan & SK escape the middle income trap?
Personally, I've always believed the best form of government is an absolute monarchy headed by a benevolent monarch. The problem with that, of course, is benevolent monarchs are few and far between.
You may be surprised your role in an absolute monarchy would be a horse manure cleaner, not a noble landlord you are imagining it in your head. Same would go for your children - with no possibility to change it. Have fun!
This is taught in German schools, but should be taught everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2%80%93_Lingua_Tertii_Im...