POLL on knowing conservatives

Casual conversation between friends. Anything goes (almost).

Personal Contact with Conservatives

1. I do not know any.
3
9%
2. I have one or more conservative friends.
15
47%
3. I know one or more conservatives.
14
44%
4. Do not know any and do not want to.
0
No votes
5. I know some and despise them.
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 32

madhusudan
Posts: 238
Joined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:54 pm

Re: POLL on knowing conservatives

Post by madhusudan »

Jikan wrote:Sorry, friend. Fascism is, strictly speaking, a right-wing ideology and practice. The left has its problems, believe me, but brownshirts ain't one of them.
What is the primary difference between international socialism and national socialism in terms of effect?
DGA
Former staff member
Posts: 9466
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: POLL on knowing conservatives

Post by DGA »

madhusudan wrote:
Jikan wrote:Sorry, friend. Fascism is, strictly speaking, a right-wing ideology and practice. The left has its problems, believe me, but brownshirts ain't one of them.
What is the primary difference between international socialism and national socialism in terms of effect?
that's a good question, but it would take a series of books to answer it. here's why.

International socialism is more than one thing. If there's one thing the left is good at, it's dissent.

National Socialism is a specific instance of fascism (I was using the term "brownshirts" to generally denote people with fascist tendencies, including contemporary street thugs and demogogues, and not only those during the Nazi period from whence the term derives).

English-language historians have a surer grip on what happened during the National Socialism period in Germany and in Fascist Italy than they do for any manifestation of state socialism. This is in no small part because the Germans kept such tidy and accurate records of everything.

So a proper answer to your question is beyond the scope of this thread.

I will say that the last years of the USSR, China since Deng, and the Fascist years in Europe all have one thing in common: the state implementing different means to capitalist accumulation. I think all of these are different modes not of state socialism, but of state capitalism*. Where does this lead? Well, to give a famous example: At the end of the Gorbachev period, what did Russians want? A socialist economy and a representative, democratic form of governance. What did they get? A capitalistic economy (with much of the wealth of the state and hence the people expropriated abroad), with a faux-democratic state structure that Brezhnev would admire.

*this isn't my idea; it's come up in analyses by authors such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Guy Debord, among many others on the left.
DGA
Former staff member
Posts: 9466
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: POLL on knowing conservatives

Post by DGA »

I was hoping to go back to Malcolm's important posts on Rawls and subsequent libertarian thought. What differentiates Rawls from thinkers like Nozick, Friedman, Hayek, von Mises, or G Becker, and hacks like Ayn Rand, is a theory of justice--of freedom articulated as justice, and not just as brand preference or the will to power. Here's a useful summary:
All social primary goods - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.
much more here:

http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/rawls.html

Does this assume some means to guarantee the equal distribution of social goods to all? Yes. And interestingly enough, that is what differentiates conservatism (think Edmund Burke) and leftist thought on one side from liberal / neoliberal / libertarian thought on the other. I mean to say that there are elements on the left and the right that agree on the fundamental problems with libertarian doctrine and practice, which goes right back to the poll that started this thread. Speaking personally, I find it a lot easier to enjoy a conversation with a reader of William Buckley than a reader of Milton Friedman or a consumer of Atlas Shrugged.

Finally, on Nozick: G.A. Cohen's persistent critiques of Nozick and other libertarian thinkers remain relevant, even twenty years later, because they haven't yet been adequately rebutted. Start here if you're interested.

http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/su ... d-equality
Malcolm
Posts: 42974
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2010 2:19 am

Re: POLL on knowing conservatives

Post by Malcolm »

Jikan wrote:I was hoping to go back to Malcolm's important posts on Rawls and subsequent libertarian thought. What differentiates Rawls from thinkers like Nozick, Friedman, Hayek, von Mises, or G Becker, and hacks like Ayn Rand, is a theory of justice--of freedom articulated as justice, and not just as brand preference or the will to power. Here's a useful summary:
All social primary goods - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.
much more here:

http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/rawls.html

Does this assume some means to guarantee the equal distribution of social goods to all? Yes. And interestingly enough, that is what differentiates conservatism (think Edmund Burke) and leftist thought on one side from liberal / neoliberal / libertarian thought on the other. I mean to say that there are elements on the left and the right that agree on the fundamental problems with libertarian doctrine and practice, which goes right back to the poll that started this thread. Speaking personally, I find it a lot easier to enjoy a conversation with a reader of William Buckley than a reader of Milton Friedman or a consumer of Atlas Shrugged.

Finally, on Nozick: G.A. Cohen's persistent critiques of Nozick and other libertarian thinkers remain relevant, even twenty years later, because they haven't yet been adequately rebutted. Start here if you're interested.

http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/su ... d-equality
I think that characterizing Nozick, and for the matter Hayek, as "libertarians" is short-sighted. Certainly libertarians who have misread these two guys have held them up as influences.

Hayek's main bugaboo is the planned economy, and his main observation is that a planned economy cannot fairly predict all needs, and therefore, it becomes defacto unethical favoritism; whereas in an unplanned economy, the chips fall where they may lay. However, it is not the case that Hayek was completely opposed to regulation, social programs and so on.

Nozick, it seems, was not very interested in defending his book on any level. Rawls and he were good friends, and I suspect that in Nozick's case, ASU was an intellectual exercise rather than a intellectual commitment. One interesting outcome of his book however, is that he asserts in ASU that we do not have the right to slaughter animals, and he apparently was himself a vegetarian.
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