Capitalism ⬌ Socialism: The Other Economic Stagnation

When skilled and unskilled people living in the digital age are asked about the sharpest divides behind economic belief, responses indicate that Socialism vs. Capitalism is (still) where it's at. It will come as no surprise that I am far from convinced that bifurcating economics along this especial a lane is coherent or productive in 2018. That is, once one applies exclusively forward-looking criteria for determining what we have most reason to dispense with and what we'd do well to preserve.

If this comes across as a pitch for the Mixed Economy as the only way forward, it goes to show just how attentively propagandized things are. There's a multitude of so-called Third Ways. Some of them incorporate aspects of ― or the totality of ― the LTV. It would be more accurate to refer to these buried models as Fourth Way, Fifth Way, etc. That won't happen, and each of those highly multifaceted mixed systems will continue to receive zero airtime and attention. So the next time you hear about the drawbacks of the Mixed Economy, try to point out that "it" has as many if not more offshoots as all the unmixed doctrines do.

Hair-splitting example: Whether an economy is mixed or unmixed says nothing about whether it is ultimately grounded in steady-state precepts or in unfettered "growthism". Visual aid time:

We Are All Deplorables Now

Joyful vs. Diffident Victories 

No matter how impressive a philosophy, ideology, system, institution or modest set of prescriptions comes across as being, it should not be spoken of glowingly. It should not be fawned over publicly, or even in the privacy of its adherents' minds.

The antithesis of it should likewise not be spoken of disparagingly or demonized in the privacy of said minds. Tall orders, these two.

It's normal to ask why. Why shouldn't you feel the way you naturally do? Why pretend that your objectively accurate or wise beliefs stop short of turning you into a protagonist, and that their inaccurate or insane beliefs do something other than turn them into the antagonists?

Since the why is so normalized and psychologically embedded, we might conclude that it is reasonable to run with it. So when a snarky meme comes along and points out that taking pride in one's beliefs is puerile, not only is it acceptable to ask why, it's downright imperative to do so. But no one asks why when called upon to acknowledge the circus that is Party Politics vis-à-vis their individual voting history.

No one with an IQ above room temperature lionizes their 2016 Clinton-Will-Do vote (anti-Trump vote), or their Trump-Will-Do/anti-Clinton vote. Only the electoral flat-earther engages in such lionization. It is generally understood that the options are wretched, that party loyalty is gullibility, and that the more conscientious a voter is, the readier they will be to hold their nose in the booth and select one type of evil to stave off the eviler evils. Apparent anti-idealists love to point all of this out, especially when an inveterate idealist who sat out the last election gets all up in their grill about the impurity of it all.

Economic Ideology: 30 Questions

Welcome to Installment #1 of a questionnaire sequence I have been working on that aspires to refine or cancel some of our rudimentary beliefs. Hopefully there will be more refining than abandoning.

Motive: If you know what it's like to see an influential celeb sound off on a monstrously complex matter, one they seem to think isn't all that complex, you'll mutter to yourself they're in way over their head with this. I sincerely believe that engaging the following questions would go a long way in making such celebs less green. Opinionated show-biz types are good question-fodder when you just can't stop inundating yourself with their less than stellar commentaries on the state of everything. But disclaimer: The same holds for neophytes from all walks of life who present as something other than neophytes.

Note also that this is only a Rough Draft. The final version will incorporate an actual polling metric for answers. Right now, I'm just seeking answers in the comment section, as well as any suggestions on how to improve the Q&A itself. This installment has 30 questions, and because it's a rough draft, there's no rule dictating how many questions participants must answer. If you only want to answer one and ignore the rest, leave a comment doing just that.

Nationalism And Sanctity

Prediction: The prism of the political is not going to decompress anytime soon. The remainder of the 21st Century will be as gratuitously polarized as the 2015-2018 years have been, if not more so.

Reasons: While identity politics has been on the receiving end of a sustained backlash, no halfway popular commentator has managed to diagnose the precursors to ID-pol.

There are multiple precursors, to be sure, but what's the main one? Well, ever notice how much harder it is to spot social media users who doubt, even faintly, that The Personal Is Political?

It has become damn near impossible to find skeptics of The Personal Is Political (henceforth TPIP) throughout social media land. Widely held TPIP hints at the runaway normalization of Political Essentialism. Though confused and untrue, essentialism in politics is rarely treated as such by the non-essentialists who don't (appear to) believe in it. You never see skeptics saying things like "Don't be such a political essentialist, you look foolish!".

With the root not being called out for the sham it is, lingering notions of TPIP have been left to fester and grow. When TPIP rides shotgun, why even be nonplussed at so many politically engaged people revelling in hyper-polarization, whether consciously or unconsciously? What's so surprising about unspoken loyalty oaths, in such a context? Of course they'll take the mile. They'll do whatever it takes when so many intellectuals give them inch after inch by failing to rail against the essence of the problem.

True, I still make it a point to observe social media users from a healthy distance. If the user is adept at networking, or is just traffic-friendly enough to be visible, the user will without exception believe TPIP.

Now, TPIP tends to be an unstated conviction, and I can fathom it being an unwitting one too. No speaker has to go around declaring "The Personal Is Political" for the astute lurker to gather that this is what the speaker has internalized.

Some speakers are in touch with their TPIP beliefs, but won't state them outright, because icky connotations. I suppose identitarian is the label that's been reserved for them, or that they've reserved for themselves...

Overall though, ordinary TPIP-ers are nowhere close to recognizing how everything from their informal rhetoric — up to their formal emphasis on first-personal methods of gaining knowledge — lends itself to such an orientation.

So while all identitarians are TPIP-ers — they reflexively believe The Personal Is Political — not all TPIP-ers are identitarians. Self-unaware TPIP-ers recoil at identitarianism, even though they'll use phrases like "Political Identity" 100%  uncritically. A huge part of their selves will be poured into their societal projects, molding their political wish-lists. If you're on social media like a meth-head on pipes, I'm probably talking about you.

The Yellow Button And Anti-Natalist Agendas

We've heard about the Red Button and the Green Button. All well and good. Now suppose there's this newly installed Yellow Button: Pressing it means you instantaneously remove all human beings from the earthly equation. That simple; poof they go.

If you'd prefer to be a bit more restrained and even-handed, amend the hypothetical so that pressing the Yellow Button means you incapacitate each human's reproductive function. This way, all unsuspecting individuals still get to live out the rest of their lives despite their newfound inability to procreate.

I'll just stick with the harsher version, for brevity's sake.

Either way, the result is the same in a generation or four: A planet devoid of humanity, with all else remaining the same.

The kicker: You don't have days/weeks/months to decide whether or not to press the Yellow Button. You must decide right now, as the button is available for a limited time only. With ample time to make the call, loose ends might not end up being so loose, and the lesson being imparted loses some of its punch.

Eternity And Mediocrity

Nick Bostrom's Infinite Ethics is a worthwhile read, but if you don't have the time, I'll just point you to this bit from the abstract:

• Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world.

Maybe you gawk at the quoted passage and conclude that contemporary cosmologists are out to lunch. Or maybe you figure Bostrom misrepresents or misconstrues what the majority of them actually believe. I don't know, and it doesn't really matter anyway, because you don't have to believe that sentient life sticking around forever is a foregone conclusion. You just have to acknowledge that the finitude of sentience isn't exactly a foregone conclusion either. The best available evidence for infinitude isn't conclusive, but it's not dismissible either.

And even if you are unfazed by the expertise of cosmologists, to the point of remaining 100% confident that sentient life is destined to go extinct for good sometime in the future, I would say the Arithmetic Paralysis quandary outlined in the paper is fascinating enough in its own right to warrant theoretical pivots. Not everything needs to implicate Applied Ethics to be worthy of our mentation.

If you have a bona fide appetite for philosophy, toying with ideas that educe incredulous stares elsewhere should be a picnic.    

"Nothing stifles intellectual curiosity like the craving for familiarity."

Me. Just now.

12 Rules For Life But Actually Insightful

The original title was going to be "Twelve Rules For Analytical Life" and I'm sure it would have garnered eye-rolls from people who gush over the Intellectual Dark Pleb. Alas that title was chucked in the bin because I have been trying to make good on my yearly New Year's Resolution to present things less snobbishly.

Except, by drawing attention to the scrapped derisive title in the first paragraph of the post, I'm falling short of the ideal anyway. At least I tried, a bit.

Here are the actually insightful twelve-rules-for-life:

Rule #1: Get a handle on epistemology.

Rule #2: Get a handle on decision theory and game theory. 

Rule #3: Familial loyalism draws from every other meritless loyalism. Refuse to play.

Rule #4: Wrap your mind around skepticism about moral responsibility.

Rule #5: Come to see that central problems in Population Ethics remain unsolved.

Rule #6: Think slow, unless you're just here to have fun.

Rule #7: Understand that beliefs aren't dispositional or representative of one's essence. Strangers with whacky beliefs need not have personal demons.

Rule #8: Feel free to be as selfish as possible in the company of ethical egoists. They'd paradoxically want you to.

Rule #9: Make up for some of that selfishness by being altruistic towards the worst off. Take your time sorting out who is and isn't at/near/above the worst-off mark.

Rule #10: The 20th Century was the bloodiest for reasons that have little to do with the usual reasons you've been fed. Combat the false narratives whenever you see them.

Rule #11: The fallacy of relative privation is only partly fallacious.

Rule #12: Don't utter "logic" without qualifiers. There are numerous forms of it, and they bump heads.

From the top:

Discursive Update Because Why Not

The end of 2017 is fast approaching and I've only managed to offer up one (deadly long) post all year. A downer. On ambitious days, the goal was to have an uneven five presentable by year's end. As is often the case, whatever time I devoted to improving dusty drafts only saw them deteriorate by becoming overwritten and inconsumable. Not unintelligible, just inconsumable, and only so for the external reader who isn't magically cohabiting my headspace. How dare they, those non-me people.

In truth, I'm being half-serious here, having reached the point where one persistently intrusive element of my psyche feels justified in scorning readers for not living in my head so as to absorb my content better. Thankfully, all the other parts of my psyche are still sane enough to know better. For now.

Anyway, I don't see any of those unfinished posts getting completed in the coming days/weeks, so rather than have myself attempt a hasty job on a random isolated topic, I'll try to pull off a hasty job on a general rundown of topics which I continue to be preoccupied with daily.

Call it a "Doxastic Clip Show" post.

The Shallowness Of Intersectionality

Ethnicity & Sexuality

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We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989: 22)

An unexamined double standard looms over thinkers and activists who nod along to quotes like this. The basic flaw is now glaringly noticeable, enough to turn me cantankerous with the willfully blind and accordingly doubtful of my ability to remain sufficiently constructively critical and non-polemical throughout this post. Despite this, my aims are high. More steeply though, concerning the specific quote, the same conviction implicates anyone who traverses racial and sexual (and other group-interest) politics from uniformly reparative angles. This holds regardless of whether the ends of a particular reparative expedition happen to be identical or similar to the ones that this quote by hooks seeks to activate and energize, and regardless of whether the reparation-seekers are at all conversant with the works of someone like hooks.

If a reparative project is anything, it is past-centric and morally transitive. While understandings of reparation can and do vary from theory to theory, all theories hold in common a central premise; their justificatory force calls for a "Past Lives Matter" criterion of reciprocation and rightness. Among other troubling things, this approach sees inter-group reparation advocates under the thumb of distributive schemes which, even in practice, so in direct policy terms, are willing to dethrone strict neutrality when doing so is the only means of securing Intergenerational Restorative Justice. So it would be wrong not to lend greater weight to a past-centered brand of justice over the more customary ideals which fasten legal and procedural neutrality across all non-dead individuals.

It gets worse. To help right past wrongs, members of certain groups are encouraged to view their raw subjective experiences as epistemic leverage for arriving at answers to questions of evidentiary import. The theories encouraging this know to adjust for varying levels of past injustices, meaning some maltreated groups (i.e. visible minorities) are afforded more first-person laxity than other maltreated groups, though this is controversial and inessential for the main tenets to be introduced.

The uncontroversial tenets hold that the more Historically Wronged groups one belongs to, the more first-personal, internally-crafted hardship cred one secures for oneself. The fewer Historically Wronged groups one belongs to, the less first-personal, internally-crafted hardship cred one secures. The upshot is that, for one particular group, no such clout is plausibly on the table. At least insofar as its members live in the West. For them, any admissible evidence and reason-giving is necessarily third-personal, statistical and otherwise non-experiential. And even then, you can't help but wonder about the hidden effects on conflict resolution. Under a selective-leverage regime, the inputs and arguments of western men, no matter how careful and aspirationally third-personal their contributions prove to be, remain open to overruling via the anecdotal tales and antics of those whose membership in one or another officially recognized marginalized group is accepted by all parties. This alone seems to not be worth the price of admission, reparation be dammed.

None of this is to suggest that the traditionally minded opponents of intergroup-reparation are altogether insusceptible to the double standards I intend to unveil here. No one is foundationally immunized from the alluringly uneven leverage oversight, no matter their professed or revealed beliefs. It just so happens that the epistemic blinders and loosened standards I'll be focusing on here are less likely to take hold as traditionalistic dogma enters the fray. How can this be? The reasons are stretchable and mazelike, intended for the diligent and temperamentally mature reader who fires no shots at the messenger and who assesses what the post is getting at incrementally.

It is commonly said that, within private affairs, or in largely depoliticized contexts, inquisitive non-judgmentalism is the best social attitude to have. When a personal choice doesn't linearly harm anyone, the choice cannot be unethical or immoral, even when it is self-indulgent or beneficently avoidant. Here a self-seeking agent's total disinterest in supererogation can at most inspire advocates of social non-judgmentalism to rely on softer terms like morally wanting, but never morally worse or wrong. In turn, voluntary associational selectivity now enjoys a cordial amoral status. And if this freely empowered association doesn't enjoy it beyond the progressive havens of the West, well then it certainly ought to, provided that all such associations are shown to be in unison broadly harmless. This, if social non-judgmentalists are going to have their say.

So when we choose to befriend Travis and avoid Melvin, we are not acting ethically or unethically. Our personal choices are just not apt for this category of scrutiny. These decisions can be prudent or imprudent, leaving them open to a yay/boo feedback mechanism from onlookers; presumably from a small number of people only, like close friends and family members. But even with those we know extremely well, the feedback is (ideally) always cashed out in distinctly non-moral forms of normatively-laced approval or disapproval. A student receiving an A or an F on a test, for instance. The grader, if he is a licensed professional, knows that he has no business casting positive or negative forms of moral judgment on the student for his performance, in line with the student's A or F. In fact, it will not even occur to the grader to overextend ethics and moral sense into this, at least once we stipulate that this grader is well-read on, and is genuinely convinced by, some of the more credible ethical theories around. The same goes for the friendship decision above. There are reasons for pushback or pressure from others, but those reasons take the form of bolstering prudence and skirting imprudence. And it stops there.

Things weren't always this unintrusive. Thankfully, hard-fought lessons have been extracted from the more intrusive days, despite how tediously gradual and drawn-out escaping them has been. But escape those days we did. For this, westerners have generic progressivism to credit, or whichever subsection of progressive politics you feel deserves props for pushing the West away from senseless trad-taboos and delivering us here.

Culturally induced monogamy, therefore, has also had its day. Its replacement doesn't implore widespread support from any dominant culture. Instead, it demands that promiscuous and non-monogamous choices not be condemned the way they were prior to the sexual revolution. As with other types of pursuits, the lifestyle stakes are (said to be) neither good nor bad. They just are, and they ought to be respected or tolerated. Respect and/or tolerance applies to intimate choices when those are assortative as well as when they prove to be post-assortative.

The setup goes something like: There are rights and there are responsibilities. Civic norms operate on the give-and-take between the two. The freer a society is, the more progressive it becomes, the more roominess it affords to arbitrary favouritisms within apolitical domains. Trying to outrun the inescapability of instinct and choice, once all impersonal responsibilities are fulfilled, is a fool's errand. Seek to stultify this progress and be met with reminders that what goes on consensually behind closed doors is no one's business dammit. Alright then.

Refining Welfarism & Moral Fallibilism

Refining Welfarism & Moral Fallibilism

A Renewed Look At Interests And Judgments

Semi poetic opener:

"Ask not what we can do for goodness, ask what goodness can do for us"

But more contentiously:

"Ask not what victimizers can do for rightness, ask what rightness can do for victims"

Now soak in the reversal:

"Ask not what goodness can do for us, ask what we can do for goodness"

And the corollary:

     "Ask not what rightness can do for victims, ask what victimizers can do for rightness"

The first set of quotes is foundationally suitable. That is to say; when reason-giving and explication bottoms out, the initial set of quotes can be declared superior to the inverted set. The ideal analyzer may declare them as superior even if the only way to get there is by fiat. No doubt, fiat is analytically icky, but rarely is it taken to be an invalidator of virtues like intellectual candor. Do candid types arrive at intellectual honesty through something other than fiat? If so, what exactly? How might we prove to someone that they ought to value intellectual honesty over the competition?

You might think that a truth-seeker proclaiming the superiority of intellectual honesty –– and with it the inferiority of intellectual dishonesty –– is disanalogous to my proclaiming the initial set of quotes as superior to the inverted set. But what makes these proclamations disanalogous? Empiricism? Come now. It can't be that. The call to science is itself a non-empirical endeavour. Denial of this manifests in the circularity of a truth-seeker applying evidence to dissuade someone against their apathy or hostility towards evidence.

When it comes to intellectual honesty, the only real competitor is intellectual dishonesty. Value the former, disvalue the latter. Simple as. The fiat, however icky, is left standing. The verdict stands tall despite its offputtingly unempirical [evaluative] origin. So it is with the above quotes, notably the first set. The only competition in town, after all, is the second set of quotes. The reversals. And they seem rather backwards, for goodness and rightness aren't persons or relational entities that can be harmed/benefitted in the first place. They are communicational tools, they are doxastic tools, and tools of all stripes should not be aggrandised as Something More.