Random Thread

[Ares Land]

For a while, I've been trying to decide whether, if I try to read Picketty's main works, I should read him in a German translation or in an English translation. I don't know French, so I can't read him in the original French.

The argument for a German translation is that German is my first language, so if I can't read something in the original language, and a translation into my first language is available, it feels stupid to read a translation into some other language instead.

The argument for an English translation is that, with my life looking the way it does right now, if I should eventually talk about his work to other people, it would probably happen in English-language online spaces, like, for instance, the ZBB, so it might be useful to have quotes, chapter headings, technical terms, and so on, available in English.

Decisions, decisions...

If it helps, I read his books in French; speaking about them here hasn't been a problem. The graphs are available with English labels on his website, which helps.

[rotting bones]

I've written yet another blog post:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... n-systems/

Surely anyone who wants to avoid theory in politics should be an anti-centrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAvOdDSbkqs

PS. Honestly, I think you are very rarely left with one obvious and practical course of action when you do away with all theory. If you read Lenin, you'll find out he thought he was being perfectly pragmatic. Marx's Capital remains one of humanity's most strenuous attempts to ground theory in facts and statistics, and it's wrong.

[Raphael]

Surely anyone who wants to avoid theory in politics should be an anti-centrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAvOdDSbkqs

Oh, that video is by no means free of theory - the guy starts out by showing a standard four quadrants political chart, which I see as one of the more ridiculous products of political theory, and doesn't even try to make the case for why people should accept the chart - it's simply presented as a given. (I stopped watching at that point, so I can't comment on the rest of the video.)

Oh, and for the record, while there was a brief time when I saw myself as a centrist, mainly because I had run out of other ways to describe myself, I no longer do so.

PS. Honestly, I think you are very rarely left with one obvious and practical course of action when you do away with all theory.

No disagreement there. You need some starting assumptions about what should happen.

If you read Lenin, you'll find out he thought he was being perfectly pragmatic.

Sure, he seems to have had a pretty clear sense of how power politics works. Less of a sense for why it might be a smart idea to limit power, though.

Marx's Capital remains one of humanity's most strenuous attempts to ground theory in facts and statistics, and it's wrong.

As I wrote before, theoretically speaking, the problem with Marx's and Engels's work is that they tried to do too much with too little - basically, they were trying to built a General Theory of Everything in the social and economic sciences with the information available to 19th century Europeans. As if a medieval astronomer had tried to come up with modern physical cosmology.

[rotting bones]

Oh, that video is by no means free of theory - the guy starts out by showing a standard four quadrants political chart, which I see as one of the more ridiculous products of political theory, and doesn't even try to make the case for why people should accept the chart - it's simply presented as a given. (I stopped watching at that point, so I can't comment on the rest of the video.)

This sounds so close to something I'd actually do that I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

[Raphael]

I was completely serious.

[rotting bones]

I was completely serious.

It's a joke video.

[MacAnDàil]

Surely anyone who wants to avoid theory in politics should be an anti-centrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAvOdDSbkqs

Oh, that video is by no means free of theory - the guy starts out by showing a standard four quadrants political chart, which I see as one of the more ridiculous products of political theory, and doesn't even try to make the case for why people should accept the chart - it's simply presented as a given. (I stopped watching at that point, so I can't comment on the rest of the video.)

What do you not like about it?

[Travis B.]

Surely anyone who wants to avoid theory in politics should be an anti-centrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAvOdDSbkqs

Oh, that video is by no means free of theory - the guy starts out by showing a standard four quadrants political chart, which I see as one of the more ridiculous products of political theory, and doesn't even try to make the case for why people should accept the chart - it's simply presented as a given. (I stopped watching at that point, so I can't comment on the rest of the video.)

What do you not like about it?

To me, the biggest issue with the four quadrants political chart is that it treats "economic left" versus "economic right" as orthogonal with "libertarian" versus "authoritarian", when the "libertarian" "economic right" is not really libertarian at all but rather is simply about concentrating power in the hands of private capitalists as opposed to the state. This is why libertarian socialists refuse to see the "libertarian" "economic right" as libertarian.

[rotting bones]

I just realized I had this publication last April from work I did a long while back: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15100

[Ares Land]

I just realized I had this publication last April from work I did a long while back: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15100

Congrats on the publication!

[rotting bones]

I just realized I had this publication last April from work I did a long while back: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15100

Congrats on the publication!

Thanks. Bet none of you suckers got ninja published without knowing it. lol

[Ares Land]

Not unless you count academia.edu

[malloc]

Given that conservative Christians have largely made their peace with round earth and heliocentrism, why do they continue to uphold creationism? It has always surprised me that evolution is not more popular among the right. With its emphasis on survival of the fittest and omnipresent competition, it seems an ideal fit for right wing ideals. If anything, I feel like reconciling the implications of evolutionary biology with left wing notions of human dignity and equality is a genuine philosophical challenge. Creationism at least teaches that all humans descend from the same two people, created in the image of God Himself, which easily lends itself to egalitarian interpretations. So how does creationism fit into the right wing worldview and why are they so hesitant to ditch it?

[Travis B.]

Given that conservative Christians have largely made their peace with round earth and heliocentrism, why do they continue to uphold creationism? It has always surprised me that evolution is not more popular among the right. With its emphasis on survival of the fittest and omnipresent competition, it seems an ideal fit for right wing ideals. If anything, I feel like reconciling the implications of evolutionary biology with left wing notions of human dignity and equality is a genuine philosophical challenge. Creationism at least teaches that all humans descend from the same two people, created in the image of God Himself, which easily lends itself to egalitarian interpretations. So how does creationism fit into the right wing worldview and why are they so hesitant to ditch it?

Remember that the right pushed "social Darwinism" quite hard in the late 19th century/early-mid 20th century, and the only reason why it was discarded was because of its association with the Nazis.

I should also note that non-evangelical Christians have for the most part made their peace with evolution, by adopting the position known as theistic evolution, i.e. that evolution is the means through which God created man and the natural world, with what is mentioned in Genesis just being a metaphor, and God set up the conditions that would allow man and the present-day natural world to come to be through evolution, knowing that these conditions would do so (considering that in this view God is omniscient).

[Travis B.]

About the round Earth, few in Europe since the times of the ancient Greeks doubted that the Earth was round (and the ancient Greeks actually determined the circumference of the Earth quite accurately). The idea that Medieval Europeans believed in a flat Earth is a modern urban legend. (The reason why so few people believed that Columbus could reach China was not that the doubted that the Earth was round but rather that Columbus was using a figure they knew to be highly inaccurate for the circumference of the Earth, so they expected him and his crew to starve to death before they reached China.)

[LingEarth]

Might be partly just because evolution is the newest of those ideas. The round earth was already established in the Hellenistic world before Christianity even existed, so most of Christian academia has been fine with it all along; and heliocentrism has been established for nearly 400 years, while the theory of evolution is still less than 200 years old. And even evolution started to be accepted by a lot of Christian academics and clergy at first; it wasn't until the mid-1900s that creationism enjoyed a resurgence as a tribal marker belief among fundamentalist evangelicals.

I have noticed that right-wing evolution-deniers like to claim that the theory of evolution and survival of the fittest inevitably leads to unsavory (and even genocidal) ideas about people, while they themselves are the most likely ones to actually apply those social Darwinist ideas to politics.

[Travis B.]

About geocentrism, this was not really a Christian position in the first place but rather a Ptolemaic one; it just happened that the Catholic Church at the time of Copernicus supported this position, but Copernicus's system, and after him, Kepler's so accurately and simply describes the nature of the solar system and the seasons that it did not take long to become standard.

[hwhatting]

Another thing is that, to my knowledge, it says nowhere in the Bible directly that the Earth is flat - you have to interprete it to come to such a conclusion. But evolution directly contradicts a literal interpretation of both creation myths. That's a big difference for literalists.

[Travis B.]

Another thing is that, to my knowledge, it says nowhere in the Bible directly that the Earth is flat - you have to interprete it to come to such a conclusion. But evolution directly contradicts a literal interpretation of both creation myths. That's a big difference for literalists.

It should be noted that reading the Bible literally is really specifically an evangelical (as in the American sense of the term, not as in the German usage of evangelisch) Protestant thing and not a Christian thing in general.

[linguistcat]

Also, survival of the fittest does not mean "survival or the strongest/fastest/etc" but rather "survival of those who best fit a niche". I'd say most humans fit as "generalist social tool users". Caring for the sick and disabled has been a part of our species' survival strategy for as long as pursuit predation has, and certainly much longer than we've had farming as a technology. Possibly since before we and Neanderthals went our separate ways biologically.