The dirt nap gap
August 8, 2017 § 74 Comments
Diversity fideism has taken another scalp, thereby proving the victim’s point.
The shrieking harpies of tolerance once again demonstrate that women and feminists aren’t thin-skinned at all (really!) in the face of big scary challenges to the diversity monoculture.
Any subhuman oppressor who attempts to politely discuss inclusiveness and open sharing of all opinions within a diverse modern high tech organization must be ejected from polite society, deprived of voice and income. Young intelligent twenty-something lightly pigmented men who very gently and apologetically notice that men and women are — despite stipulated wide individual variation and the occasional surgical adventurer — generally different qua populations, pose a terrible threat to billionaire masters of the universe who also happen to be young intelligent lightly pigmented men.
What constitutes ‘fact’ doesn’t depend upon empirical reality: it depends upon narrative-established victim status. That over 90% of work related fatalities are men is not a relevant fact at all: nobody is lobbying to close the dirt nap gap.
That individual women who accomplish the same things as men in the same position make the same pay is not a relevant fact. (That they actually shouldn’t be paid as much for the same work is something which must never be proposed at all. That is even worse than noticing that importing a pliable Mexican underclass harms the prospects of a more darkly pigmented and less pliable American underclass).
That women as a population earn less than men on average is a relevant fact; but only inasmuch as it is founded on the idea that women are not moral agents making their own decisions. The observation that women qua population might be making free choices which affect average pay is not a relevant fact. White men are awful oppressors and the reason they dominate Fortune 500 boards is unfair bias.
These are foundational propositions in the Current Year version of the modern creed, dogmas not subject to empirical falsification and set in opposition to transcendent evil. Blind faith in the ruling class religion of total open-mindedness and the nonexistence of authority must never be questioned, no matter what your lying eyes may tell you.
The glass ceiling and the dirt floor are joined together by walls of irony resting on a foundation of bones, walls built and maintained by slaves chanting the mantra of freedom.
Zippy Catholic 
At this point I would like to propose Robert’s First Principle of Political Correctness:
“The more strongly a belief is suppressed by large-scale agents with political, social, or economic power, the more likely that belief is to be correct and the more personally valuable maintaining that belief is. The reason for this is that there is little need to suppress false beliefs or true beliefs that are of little value to an individual, because intelligent agents will naturally discard or ignore them.”
If I’m not the first person to state this rule in this way, I’d like to know. This rule seems generally applicable to a wide spectrum of beliefs, including racism, sexism, Communism, etc.
Most interestingly, this principle would seem to indicate that Jesus’s teachings were very likely true, otherwise there would have not been such a strong desire for the existing religious establishment to silence him.
I love how clear it is that the “most recent scalp” was himself a very liberal person. If you read the document is it apparent that he is just not quite Current Year enough. He clearly values diversity and equality for their own sakes, though. Liberal mind-trap/black-hole at work again.
It would be interesting to see the reaction if this post, all links included, were put into google’s internal employee chat room. I would probably find it amusing if the insanity weren’t so depressing.
TimFinnegan:
It would be even more amusing if the room could only be unlocked once an artificial intelligence bot confirmed that the employees in the room could accurately paraphrase the posts.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
“Diversity fideism has taken another scalp…”
I disagree with this part. Some guy releases a ten page manifesto designed to create strife and disharmony inside a corporation and then it goes viral, you need to just fire him. Doesn’t matter what he said or whether he was right,his methods were wrong and he exceeded the bounds of his authority. Diversity didn’t take a scalp, this guy’s own behavior did.
Ha! That would be entertaining. They are supposed to be in the upper echelon of intelligence in our society; I’m sure it would be child’s play for them to accurately paraphrase an internet clown named Zippy.
Insanitybytes22:
Hear, hear! I was *trying* to get at that in my initial comments to the previous post. We always have to keep in mind what is *expedient*, not merely what is *lawful* for us.
Terry Morris and insanitybytes22:
I have a slightly more sympathetic view, I guess. I expect this young guy in his first job out of college made the mistake of taking the company’s expressed policies and values seriously: I doubt it ever occurred to him that it is actually impossible to take them seriously (because they are incoherent).
I recall with fond embarrassment some of the internal memos I wrote in my twenties, not to mention the time I was almost fired for expressing politically incorrect views. I got to meet the VP of Commercial Relations (head of security) for a Fortune 50 company — there were no “diversity officers” at the time, though we were all subjected to regular mandatory “sexual harassment” seminars and the like. It helped that he was sympathetic and that my own performance was, according to my boss at the time, flawlessly professional. So the SJW’s failed to acquire my scalp, and instead acquired a more worldly critic.
I still feel bad for my supervisors when I was in my twenties. But anyway, the point is that we all start out young and naïve, all the while fully convinced of our own worldliness.
You both are right though that this was also a self-immolation. Google like all tech companies has had to profess egalitarianism while concretely practicing meritocracy from the beginning, and anything that makes the conflict between creed and practice explicit is a danger to the business.
Zippy,
You both are right though that this was also a self-immolation.
Both of them actually think that it was right for Google to do this. In fact, IB’s own characterization of what he did was to make him sound like he was a radical, frothing malcontent when everyone except SJWs, including mainstream liberals, is in general agreement that the manifesto was very civil, thoughtful and actually nothing more than a slap back at people who openly dehumanize others who disagree with them.
I forgot to mention that I saw an accusation from someone on /pol who says they’re a Googler that Google is notorious for tolerating sexual harassment toward straight men by homosexuals and trannies that is flat out, black letter of the law illegal. The claim went further to add that anyone who goes to HR tends to find it a career-ending move.
Now, before I am accused of spreading hearsay, I believe it precisely because I have credible acquaintances who work for other big tech firms that have personally experienced retaliation for speaking up against abuse from homosexuals that would should have been career-ending moves for the homosexuals. When people I know and trust have seen HR and legal blatantly disregard corporate liability to protect muh diversiteh in very dangerous ways, I have no problem believing that an even more radical workforce like Google would have even worse manifestations.
“In fact, IB’s own characterization of what he did was to make him sound like he was a radical, frothing malcontent….”
Actually I am the “radical, frothing, malcontent” who has sat through more meetings trying not to roll my eyes than I can count. Welcome to the grown up world. Such behavior is often what we’re called to do.
I remember one class on sexual harassment that was so bad, I was quite convinced I had probably been sexually harassing myself all along. And another on diversity I did object to, that suggested it was bad to throw someone down on the ground and start kicking them….if they were gay or a minority. I kept trying to insist it was just wrong throw any of your co workers on the ground and kick them, but to no avail.
I think this is an example where we can see that authority exists and can do stupid things while still remaining an authority.
I don’t know the exact nature of the internal memo-delivery system used, but I think the person who deserves the least sympathy in the whole debacle is the jackwagon who gave the memo to the press (probably for some money). I sympathize with both the man and google in the situation, especially if google is going to end up fighting legal battles about their hiring and salary processes as it relates to diversity. But the guy who gave the press the internal memo? Not a chance.
Actually I am the “radical, frothing, malcontent” who has sat through more meetings trying not to roll my eyes than I can count. Welcome to the grown up world. Such behavior is often what we’re called to do.
As Zippy said, his biggest mistake was thinking that their stated values were something bigger and better than a sheet of toilet paper.
Mike T:
insanitybytes22’s description was ambiguous: she objected to my statement “Diversity fideism has taken another scalp…” when this is obviously precisely what happened. If the dominant fideist religion of Silicon Valley were not advanced liberalism then this obviously would not have occurred at all. As it is, this fellow did the equivalent of insulting Mahomet in the court of the Sultan. I took that to be her point: that this was a self-immolation. But my understanding/paraphrase of what someone else said could, as always, be wrong.
I am very happy to not be the CEO of Google right now, for the same reason that I am very happy to not be King of America: because the subject population is ungovernable and becoming more so every day.
TimFinnegan,
This is very relevant to your point. As I see it, the CEO sacrificed Damore to appease a large chunk of his labor force. He had the authority to do that, but that is actually a minor note in the bigger issue he faces as an authority.
If Breitbart is correct, a lot of the very people that Damore was targeting are not just the usual suspects who actually do sow strife and disharmony through their activism and bad behavior, but are also an extremely serious threat to the reputation and legal security of Google. They have more in common with untrustworthy, mutinous troops than good soldiers in that respect.
This is not just stupid, but dangerous to the CEO’s authority and control over his own company. If you dig into the details, you find that among other things, many of his workers made it clear that management could not force them to work with him. The picture is rather clear: he sacrificed a decent employee to placate the very ones who should have been swiftly terminated for harming the company and insubordination.
As it is, this fellow did the equivalent of insulting Mahomet in the court of the Sultan. I took that to be her point: that this was a self-immolation.
When you say that he should be fired (or beheaded in the Mahomet case) rather than engaged or rebuked, it does tend to put you further away from the “he sadly just did this to himself” camp and more into the “he damn well deserved this” camp.
Mike T:
Would you agree that it would have been dangerous to the business to keep him on once his name, the memo, and all of the reaction to it became public?
I think it quite plausibly would have, despite the ‘reverse hatefact’ that this might represent. IOW it seems plausible that someone might fire him for a whole variety of boots-on-the-ground reasons while at the same time being in full agreement with the contents of his essay.
This doesn’t make it ‘right’. If we are addressing right and wrong then committing an injustice (however small, against anyone) for financial gain (however large, and including merely wealth preservation) is never justified, by definition.
I agree with that characterization (though it is also just as possible that the CEO did so based on his own ‘true belief’ in fideist diversity). Can you agree that failure to appease that workforce (and a large, militantly active part of the customer base to boot) could have caused significant material problems with the business?
Mike T:
There is a nontrivial difference between suggesting (say) that Daniel Pearl got himself beheaded and should have behaved more prudently in his engagement with Mohammedans, on the one hand, and suggesting that beheading him was the right thing to do on the other.
It is a worthwhile distinction to clarify, and it doesn’t seem like you’ve grasped it.
Pointing out that a victim should have acted more prudently isn’t the same thing as ‘blaming the victim’.
This is every bit as true in this case as it is in the case of a young tatted up hitchhiker in a miniskirt at midnight outside of a Metallica concert. Refusal to concede the point that imprudence in a victim is orthogonal to perpetrator guilt, is an SJW tactic.
The only solution to what is happening that I can even imagine, is for people to start their own small businesses, to become more entrepreneurial. We call these things workplace politics and the politics of the workplace have now become very liberal, very far left in many areas. You just can’t win that war, because you can’t change a company’s labor base, their customer base, their policies.
Zippy,
I agree it was imprudent. In fact, I said as much in concurring with you about him being painfully naive and taking them at face value on their proclaimed “values.”
IB,
You just can’t win that war, because you can’t change a company’s labor base, their customer base, their policies.
Yes and no. He failed individually, but sometimes forcing the authority to reveal their true colors (and to reveal the true colors of the mob/faction coercing them) is the first critical step to forcing change. The fact is that what we call the “alt-right” is really just the first step of the right throwing off the old Buckleyite “I am too much of a gentleman to fight back” nonsense and actually taking the left seriously that they want to destroy us. The reason everyone is scared in the media and chattering classes is that they know that if the right collectively stands up and fights the bully might get badly pummeled and beaten.
We haven’t even begun to really fight this.
I agree with that characterization (though it is also just as possible that the CEO did so based on his own ‘true belief’ in fideist diversity). Can you agree that failure to appease that workforce (and a large, militantly active part of the customer base to boot) could have caused significant material problems with the business?
Yes, but the problem grows with every act of appeasement. That’s why I stand by my comment that he should have at least made a public example of terminating a number of high profile “I will not work with this guy” self-righteous employees on the grounds that management will not tolerate that, particularly since some of them made it clear in writing that they didn’t care if this behavior cost the company marketshare and revenue.
STALINISM is the name for what you all are describing, and some of the posts (such as Mike T, 6:11 PM) make it quite clear. You might also be interested in the related issue of branding children as transgender
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TRANSGENDER_DAY_CAMP_TIPS_FOR_PARENTS_CAOL-?SITE=SCAND&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
I suspect it will soon become compulsory in Canada (I am not joking) and that quotas will be imposed on schools in the USA.
The idea of insanitybytes22 of starting smaller communities and businesses is the only hope I can see or imagine at this stage. Big is toxic, because no non-elective higher authority has any answer to the Stalinists. (This was the same thing that happened in the late 1940s and early 1950s in areas under Soviet domination: the “Iron Curtain” was not something that happened in a day, but took years to eliminate all limits.)
Most people are unwilling to eliminate, without equivocation or hedging, even their own liberal commitments. Of those very few who are both willing and able, none are capable of unequivocally eliminating the liberal commitments of those who are closest to them and over whom they have the most influence. I know that I am myself almost entirely unsuccessful in that endeavor, and I retain the conceit that my own skills and motivation in this respect exceed the norm substantially.
And until that is accomplished all chatter about “Benedict option” style whole communities is self-deceptive nonsense on stilts. You can’t build whole communities which unequivocally reject liberalism without starting with yourself; and next proceeding to persons over whom your own persuasion is maximal.
LarryDickson:
I gather from the general tenor of your posts that you believe that the problem is pretty much anything but right-liberalism, that is, anything but a conservatism committed to conserving liberty as a political priority. Maybe I am misinterpreting the situation; but if I am not, then your first priority should be eliminating any remaining commitments that you personally have to political liberty. Until you’ve accomplished that, any formal opposition you propose to Current Year liberalism is pointless.
I’m not a fan of the Benedict option either, the problem being just as Zippy describes. But as a temporary solution for what ails us, starting small businesses of your own can help. Moving to better areas, hanging out with like minded people. I think a big part of cultural change is actually lots of prayer of course, and also waiting them out. Liberals tend to self destruct and hearts and minds often get won just by seeing that happen. Their ideas are incoherent but also unsustainable. President Trump’s election, whatever people may think of him, is some evidence of people wanting change.
insanitybytes22:
Trump’s election is evidence that what was not long ago considered far left is today considered far right. This kid’s “manifesto” that got him fired for not being left enough to be even employable no matter what his skills, would have been considered far left just a few decades ago.
But conservatism always finds a way to celebrate its defeats as if they were victories.
Zippy,
But aren’t you against starving people to death?
I don’t understand why my company makes me take sexual harassment classes: I’m already really good at it.
“Trump’s election is evidence that what was not long ago considered far left is today considered far right”
Yes, but he was also a wild card, like throwing everything you have at the broadside of a barn. It’s not that he is right or left or even good, it is that he is evidence that people realize something is all wrong. The first step towards cultural change is first realizing something is wrong. So while your Google guy may have self immolated, he too is also evidence of people realizing something is all wrong with the path we are on.
insanitybytes22:
Liberal societies always have a large cohort of people who “realize something is all wrong”. That, combined with failure to unequivocally reject liberalism, is what fuels and perpetuates the eternal revolution.
Well Zippy,if I can’t offer you some encouragement, I’ll just have to suggest we laugh at Ian’s joke about sexual harassment class. Those who laugh, last.
“So while your Google guy may have self immolated, he too is also evidence of people realizing something is all wrong with the path we are on.”
There’s a Zippy post somewhere that describes conservatives basically as sysiphean janitors condemned to mopping up the vomit and garbage after the Current Year’s progressive barn-burner and setting the stage for the next one.
The RAISE Act and the right-liberal opposition to it reveals that many right-liberals are just what one might call “libertarian prudes.” They object–specifically–to the idea that Trump and his supporters in Congress want a bill that actually prioritizes the welfare of a majority of Americans, not the profits of businesses that hire immigrants (mostly H2bs, not H1bs in this case)
Some of these things are only far left positions because right-liberals think that anytime the US Government actually forces business to operate on the basis of “what is good for GM is good for America and what is good for America is good for GM” is ¡Socialism!
Very interesting, actually.
A careful perusal of the 10-page document (which is nowhere as inflammatory as the media or feminist writers want to paint it) reveals that it is a fairly liberal (“left-of-centre”, if you will) document which relies mainly on findings from secular psychology and evolutionary theory, and argues in favour of “safe spaces” and “affirmative action” for everyone, resulting in a pretty case of reductio ad absurdam.
I guess the moral is that fighting liberalism with liberalism is a lost cause.
Zippy said:
This reminds me of a certain video I saw that helped clearly define the Left and Right of politics by saying how the the Left is always defined positively as believing that equality is the primary goal of politics, while the Right is defined negatively as anything else that does not have equality to some extent a primary goal of politics.
With this definition, the Left is defined by what it actually is, while the Right is defined by what it is not. With this in mind, it is easy to see how the Left always demands more and more equality and will eventually leave in the dust those ”former” leftists who have gotten their prefered level of equality in politics fulfilled but are now seeing the Left as going too far with the amount of equality and are thus autommatically in the realm of the Right.
Trump is now seen as far-right because the amount of equality that exists now has satisfied leftists of the past and they now see the levels of equality being too much and are thus automatically excommunicated from the Left and into the realm of the Right by sheer expansion of the black hole of equality.
One thing to note is that this guy did not circulate a 10 page dissenting memo, which would make his firing reasonable. This was one post on one thread of an apparently quite active internal discussion board. This was also a response to a fallacious argument presented in terms of bayesian probability favoring more active recruitment of minorities and women. Further, google’s apparent policy was to encourage, not merely tolerate participation and lively discussion in these threads. This guy does not appear to have been a troublemaker but a kind of victim of entrapment.
Josh:
That confirms my suspicions. High tech companies have to operate formally under a liberal creed and substantively as a meritocracy, where (it is thought) the best grasp of reality, the highest level of competence, and the best arguments win in a ‘neutral’ public square which prescinds from any pre-judgment (prejudice) against ideas on moral grounds. This of course just is liberalism and is rationally incoherent; instantiated into a real social context we get the black hole, and this kid’s career was just destroyed by gravitational forces of which he was probably entirely unaware. He took the policies at face value, and never saw the nature of the Predator until the knife entered.
It is one of the ironies of liberalism that liberals tend to firmly believe in their own open mindedness while being substantively committed to a narrow, insane, obviously anti-realist fideism. I’ve pointed out before that this is like a religion, but with authority as its proper object rather than Being as such.
John:
In my understanding, liberalism is commitment to political liberty. The commitment to equal rights follows from the more primal commitment to liberty.
Left and right describe the dispositions of different parts of the population. Originally “right wing” referred to supporters of the king — to monarchists. But this is because of the conservative disposition of the population labeled “right wing”.
The “left wing” is progressive: it is the impatient part of the population which wants to get on with the project of carrying out the imperatives of liberalism.
The “right wing” is conservative: it wants to preserve what it sees as the accomplishments of liberalism and thinks that progressives’ commitment to liberty is not authentic. The right wing loves liberalism but thinks that progressives go too far and violate common sense.
But it is all just liberalism: liberalism progressing its way to, and then conserving, ever new atrocities.
In my experience you can get through most of the equality-and-diversity drivel by looking sincere and listening politely until it’s all over. You don’t expect sense from these people (nobody does), and I think most employees see the sessions as a bit of a joke.
Holding your tongue when it’s sensible to do so is also pretty easy, methinks.
What troubles me a bit more is the prospect of having to say “I love gay Pride!” in my email signature, or to wear a rainbow bracelet on national Share-My-AIDS day or something, because that starts to seem more like actively condoning something I shouldn’t.
Even then, I think you’d have to go pretty far before your started offering the proverbial “pinch of incense” that Rod Dreher is always talking about. Does wearing a rainbow bracelet unwillingly because your employer uses his authority to force you to do so count as formal cooperation with evil?
Well, it looks like the liberals at Google may very well get a lesson on authority good and hard from Uncle Sam over this because it just so turns out that…
Under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, employers are barred from prohibiting employees from organizing a union—nor can they interfere with “concerted activities” aimed at improving the workplace.
Going to be pretty hard to prove that a memo aimed at demanding that leadership protect coworkers from toxic behaviors is anything but “improving the workplace.” Get some popcorn and watch this play out. It would be hilarious to see the NLRB kick Google’s ass up and won the West Coast over this.
Edward:
Does Dreher ever voluntarily vote in liberal democratic elections? If so then that would make any “pinch of incense” talk on his part more than a little ironic.
I read an article that was a semi-interview of him a few months back, that implied he is more or less in favor of civil unions for homosexuals while maintaining firm opposition to gay marriage. To what extent he supports civil unions is unknown to me as I have rarely read much by him that was more than Eastern Orthodox flavored versions of the same stuff put out by Focus on the Family and FRC by professional evangelicals.
However, it seems to me that if you are unable to unequivocally say “I accept that you have the authority to permit many things with homosexuality, but I don’t accept that this is the right use of authority” then you’ll almost certainly not be able to follow St. Benedict’s practices.
Zippy:
Quite. Even taking it as read that wearing the rainbow bracelet is wrong, assuming you are working to support a family you must have some hefty mitigating factors on your side when it comes to obeying your employer’s dubious demands.
Mitigating factors for voting in a US election… Hmm.
On the factual level, I suspect he’d vote Republican if he thought they would protect the famous freedoms of religion and of speech.
He took the policies at face value, and never saw the nature of the Predator until the knife entered
Or as Moldbug put it, when the progressives move from hollow platitudes to their Darth Vader voice.
Patrick:
You may be thinking of this post.
Part of the ‘genius’ of liberalism is how it recruits all of society to advance it (the job of progressives) and preserve it (the job of conservatives).
It does this by making everyone believe that authentic political liberty implies just what they believe it to imply, and not what those other bad people dishonestly say that it implies. Liberalism is able to be ‘all things to all people’ in this particular way because it is self contradictory.
If liberalism were a person it would be a sociopathic liar who tells everyone just what they want to hear. And all of society is its bitch.
Mike T.,
You wrote [paraphrase],
‘We haven’t really started to fight this’.
Depends on the time scale you use to observe. In my mind, I’ve already one, I am just waiting for people to notice.
Zippy,
You wrote,
“Most people are unwilling to eliminate, without equivocation or hedging, even their own liberal commitments. Of those very few who are both willing and able, none are capable of unequivocally eliminating the liberal commitments of those who are closest to them and over whom they have the most influence.”
I politely disagree with the use of ‘none’.
You continued,
“You can’t build whole communities which unequivocally reject liberalism without starting with yourself; and next proceeding to persons over whom your own persuasion is maximal.”
I concur. But once you reach a certain critical mass I hope it would grow on its own.
Hilarious meme about this issue…
We all know that there is something magical about modern technology, so you must be a racist if you don’t want a shaman working on your car’s computer vision algorithms.
While I am unequivocally in favor of taking the log out of your own eye, this seems a little like letting the perfect get in the way of the good. Last-Year liberals opposing Current Year liberals is still a human opposing (some amount of) evil, and is not “pointless.”
No one goes from right-liberal to illiberal in one step. At least no one I’ve heard of.
Ian,
I don’t understand why my company makes me take sexual harassment classes: I’m already really good at it.
Always room for improvement. Quid pro quo or go home.
Mike T,
Get some popcorn and watch this play out.
I doubt you understood the word ‘concerted’ in the rule. I’m not going to defend Google’s behavior in this fiasco, but as exceedingly petty and vindictive as it was it also wasn’t in the same galaxy as a labor board violation. Ironically, if he was represented by a union which conservatives typically disdain, he would almost certainly still be employed and possibly still criticizing company policy. Absent criminal wrongdoing, immediate firings rarely happen for union workers and even discipline over something this minor would be very difficult.
Honestly I’m surprised Google didn’t reassign him to the reeducation camps or something like that, firing him seems to be causing a Streisand Effect.
Step2,
I doubt you understood the word ‘concerted’ in the rule.
IANAL. I just posted what some media outlets are saying. The letter of the law might not necessarily save them on this. There is more than enough misconduct in Silicon Valley that anything that brings federal attention is likely to rip up the rug and find a lot of dirt.
It would be somewhat funny if Google got sued for firing this guy under California’s liberal inspired diversity employment laws. I have a feeling the Feds are not really in Goggle’s pocket anymore. The evidence of management saying they had the right to blacklist him for future employment looks like a pretty clear violation of the EEOC standards to me.
And once there’s blood in the water, there could be a feeding frenzy.
The only thing keeping the left-liberals from eating themselves are the right-liberals.
Yet another data point on what the feds might find if they get involved.
One of the big Silicon Valley giants should be targeted for total corporate destruction by the feds. By the time the DoJ is done, it should look like Carthage after the Roman legions passed through except with court filings instead of salt and GSA personnel auctioning off the real estate.
Also, I encourage everyone here to try out Brave as a replacement to Chrome.
This kind of sums it up:
1) For the purposes of employee non-discrimination policy, there is no such thing as a male brain or a female brain. Any suggestion to the contrary is rank bigotry.
2) For the purposes of transgender policy, each person’s brain is either male or female. Any suggestion to the contrary is rank bigotry.
But the incoherence stems from liberalism itself.
Zippy, your answers to my post (Aug 8, 9:55 and 10:15 PM) did not answer any of the points I made. After your excellent work in the Usury book, I find this repetitive sloganeering on your part rather discouraging.
All secular authority is ad hoc. Political liberty is good as long as it includes self-restraint according to the moral law. What is called “liberalism” (either left or right) is political liberty WITHOUT self-restraint according to the moral law, and is bad.
The only defense remaining against Stalinism is the voting booth. All non-elective authorities have succumbed to Stalinism because they cannot answer it, being trapped in the Enlightenment “no God, no human nature” paradigm. This includes most Catholic bishops.
LarryDickson:
I can’t tell what putative substantive points you mean. I am not being rhetorical or snarky: I literally see nothing except stereotypical right-liberal tautology and question begging in your comments.
As far as I can tell you use the term “ad hoc” to beg the question: you might as well use the term “brillig”.
So twas brillig in the slithy toves, ergo political liberty in the tautological sense (people should be empowered to do what they should be empowered to do and shouldn’t be empowered to do what they shouldn’t), therefore right liberalism as counter to “stalinism” (but we won’t call it right liberalism even though it entails commitment to political liberty).
Maybe someone else can help me out, if there actually is something more substantive than that to see here.
LarryDickson,
Why are you so sure morality can restrain an incoherent political philosophy (liberalism) but morality cannot tame coherent political philosophies? Why the need to save liberty at all costs? Because Stalinism is somehow the only other option? Was the world so horrible until political liberty showed up to save it?
Please, both of you, read what I said and use your knowledge of the English language. I have made a distinction between “liberalism” and “political liberty” (claiming the former is a proper subset of the latter) based on self-restraint according to the moral law. Are you claiming that political liberty and self-restraint according to the moral law are incompatible? If so, you need to defend that claim, which is absurd on its face, since it implies good people never use political liberty to promote what is good. (Whether they succeed is another question.)
Railing against liberalism therefore does not affect my point, since I reject it too as opposed to the moral law.
As for “ad hoc”, it stands in opposition to “established by divine right”, and I gave a common example of it several threads ago – a citizen who takes it upon himself to direct traffic after an accident. Papal and apostolic authority are established by divine right; parental and elder and husband’s authority are encouraged and conditionally established by divine right; everything else is ad hoc. (Check out the Prophet Samuel on kings versus the last verse of the Book of Judges.) This does NOT mean there is any right to ignore the commands of an ad hoc authority doing God’s work (Romans 13).
LarryDickson,
You are claiming a distinction between political liberty and liberalism, but nothing in your comments supports this distinction. Liberalism is a primary political commitment to liberty. You have argued that political liberty (restrained) should be a political primary in order to prevent Stalinism or whatever.
So, sure, you are arguing for a tamed liberalism. Even one tamed by the moral law. Zippy has written much showing why that’s impossible.
LarryDickson:
And I reject that as a mere word game. Liberalism just is commitment to political liberty. Adding ‘based on self restraint according to the moral law’ merely turns it into a tautology.
I am claiming that political liberty (liberalism) is either a tautology (as in your usage) or self contradictory. There are probably hundreds of posts and thousands of comments here and elsewhere explaining precisely these contentions, the reasons why they accurately reflect reality, and liberalism’s further implications as a doctrine to which real populations of real people are committed.
The fact that you think that means that you are still attempting to argue against a position which you haven’t adequately grasped in the first place. You are still stuck in the mind trap of believing that as long as liberty means just what you think it means, nothing more, nothing less, and doesn’t mean what those bad Stalinists mean, then political liberty is good.
See (just for example) here.
In that case the labeling of authority ‘ad hoc’ doesn’t lead immediately to the liberalism (commitment to political liberty) which you claim it supports, even if we stipulate.
But I wouldn’t stipulate in the first place. I don’t have a comprehensive or even adequate theory of the origins of authority in general. I’d probably handwave that – like morality more generally – authority emerges from Divine and natural law (which are distinct but consonant with each other).
But that is really just handwaving, and in no way calls into question my careful arguments and conclusions that political liberalism specifically — commitment to political liberty — is an equivocal motte (tautological, failing to make any distinction) and bailey (self contradictory, capable of making any distinction or its opposite via the principle of explosion) doctrine.
Wood:
Yes, exactly.
And that just is liberalism. Everyone wants a nice tame liberalism that only makes and enforces the authoritative discriminations they want it to make and enforce, and doesn’t make and enforce the authoritative discriminations that those rotten tyrants over there want it to make and enforce.
And this universal commitment to liberalism (political liberty) is what structures our political and social reality.
It seems that society is in a negative feedback loop with regards to diversity Gideon’s. Widespread diversity fideism makes firing this guy necessary to appease the diversity fideism and avoid significant economic problems (and possibly legal problems), and yet doing so furthers the diversity fideism in society.
So many Google employees apparently told the CEO that they didn’t feel safe expressing contrary opinions that he had to formally cancel their townhall meeting to discuss the issues around this. The CEO needs to wake up and realize that the only way to get himself out of this, if nothing else, is to gather a list of 100 managers at all levels who tolerate this behavior and publicly terminate them and specifically cite in the press release that they are being fired for suborning a vicious and hostile pattern of behavior against their subordinates.
“Google employees apparently told the CEO that they didn’t feel safe expressing contrary opinions…..”
One characteristic of liberalism is how unsafe it makes everyone feel. Liberal parenting for example, makes kids feel very unsafe. Liberal colleges and everyone is desperately trying to find their “safe space.” Liberal workplaces are scary because the authority is always incoherent and the rules are always changing and contradicting themselves. It’s an unsafe workplace. To compensate they are forever trying to write policies and mandates,but that red tape is also often scary and contradictory.
Liberal moral ambiguity creates fear, fear is generally what is behind our feeling unsafe.
One characteristic of liberalism is how unsafe it makes everyone feel.
And in many cases there is good reason. Some liberal factions openly murder people for simple disagreement. Others engage in witchhunts and public defamation so bad that it drives normal people out of polite society. If I had to guess, that is the sort of “I feel unsafe” these people were expressing, and it would be entirely rational to feel unsafe at Google if you’re not a SJW. Heck, even if you’re a SJW you should watch your back.
Zippy,
I agree that as any sort of long-term solution, a “Benedict option” that does not unequivocally reject liberalism is a non-starter.
But it seems like it could still be good for more short-term goals, such as raising your children in the faith: I’d feel a lot better about raising a family in a community comprised of a bunch of Christian right-liberals compared to a community comprised of a bunch of Communist baby-murdering sodomites.
Ian:
We have to live in the communities in which we actually live, and there are always ‘tactical’ choices to be made — where to send your kids to college, etc. And there are certainly better and worse choices in that respect. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
However, my comment was directed toward the building or founding of illiberal communities. People who can’t even bring themselves to unequivocally reject liberalism are not going to succeed in building illiberal communities.
Suppose I had instead suggested that unrepentant whores or people with unrepentant commitments to whoredom as an institution cannot successfully found orthodox convents.
Suppose I stipulate that some unrepentant whores are in fact far better to live with in a community than others, and that some whorehouses are far more civilized than others. Suppose necessity required that I do business with whores, employ whore taxi drivers, maybe even send my kids to a whore-run school.
Do these stipulations call my initial contention into question?
No, they don’t.
[…] In 2017, free speech means that you can say anything hateful and false you want to about white people and Christians, pollute the community with despicable pornography, and commit blasphemy against Christ (but not against the false and violent religion of Islam). But stating facts about official victim groups in the most apologetic way possible can destroy your livelihood and turn you into a national pariah. […]