The Good Post Gallery

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No post without proper paragraphing has ever been good.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Arguing that Communist repression of religious practice and organisation had nothing to do with the personal atheism of Communist leaders is actively and openly absurd.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, look. The 'ironic' Uncle Tom cheers on the open racist.

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Yes, that is a very good post.

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What the f[inks]ck is wrong with you?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It isn't just that the point is good or that the argument is on the side of righteousness (though there's no doubting either fact), the language and structure are just right as well.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Inks, Cory is an admitted eugenicist.

Cory, I wish I could say that saying things like this makes you a bad Democrat, or a Democrat-in-name-only, but the sad thing is, that's not actually true. There's very much a place within the Democratic Party for your positions, but it's an ugly place and a lot of what's wrong with the party and the contemporary American 'left', such as it is, in general. The only thing you seem interested in, at least in any positive sense, is advancing a set of scientific and pseudo-scientific agendas and narratives into areas where no scientific and pseudo-scientific agendas and narratives have gone before, on grounds that are utilitarian to the point of outright bloodlessness, somewhere between completely unconcerned and actively gleeful at the collateral damage thus wrought on preexisting cultural and humane values. You don't seem particularly concerned with taking a critical attitude towards class or sex (but I may have missed this; if this is incorrect, I apologize), and your attitudes towards race, particularly as it relates to crime and punishment, and mental health, particularly as it relates to crime and punishment, are atavistic, filled with calumnies against black bodies and unwell minds more suited to the most unselfconscious set of Southern Senators of old.

You're certainly not alone in any of this, and it's not really identifiably Old Left or New Left in the American context at all. If anything it's the attitude of an unlucky Liberal Imperialist who fell through a wormhole from 1890s Britain into the wrong place, or an attitude from an alternate history in which Liberal Imperialism in more or less its original form persisted and managed to internalize the language of the most strident, immoderate, and unhelpful liberal and in some cases socialist or communist attacks on religion on its way from its proper habitat to the present day. Or just a sort of (terms used as shorthand and thus not a hundred per cent accurate) anti-religious neoconservatism or punitive Trotskyism. The Other isn't there to be either met and understood as Other (pace many forms of leftism) or assimilated as reflected Self (pace many other forms of leftism and some of rightism), but to serve as a figure of fun at best, and to be warred against without quarter when it's particularly annoying to one's own sensibilites. Certain of the paeans you've made to the cultural power and glory of the West seem to have more points of contact with the geopolitical realities in The Lord of the Rings than those in real life. There's a very specific society that is right and meet and good and just and proper, and that which is not--those who are not--in conformity with it are expendable, and acceptable targets for state-sanctioned killing or worse. The self-righteousness involved is the least of the problems with this.

(To those who say I'm at least as self-righteous as Cory if not more so: Of course I am. This is, for my psychology, the natural outgrowth of considering my beliefs better than his, and if I didn't consider my beliefs better than his I wouldn't hold them. I admit that said self-righteousness is as much personality flaw for me as for anybody else, but again, it's the least of the problems I see in the worldview I'm describing.)

If I'm to give one piece of constructive criticism, it's not so much to change any of these aspects of your worldview, as I'm not sure you can and I think your perspective is in some ways valuable if in my opinion awful, as to make more of an effort to understand those who disagree with you as something other than the Enemy. I still remember the first time we discussed gene therapy, human genetic engineering, eugenic abortion, and related issues. That time you treated my objections as those of a lunatic who was out to make people suffer, rather than as somebody who happens to value diversity of experience more than you and normative functioning less, who's perhaps more prone to naturalistic fallacies than you and less prone to category errors. I'd hate to see how that conversation would have gone between you and somebody who's a comparably strident reactionary on those issues.

And no, of course Professor St James shouldn't be tried, except possibly in the Court of Awful Assumed Names. That would be double jeopardy, at least in spirit (probably legally also, since it seems like he would have had to be tried in 1967 in order to be found insane).