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[content warning: discussion of Naziism, violence, persecution of Christians, racism, whorephobia, Maoism]
People who are not participants are welcome to comment to give book recommendations, talk about what other people are reading, or talk about books that they’ve read recently that they disagree with. If you are confused about what the epistemic closure challenge is, read this.
General Notes: First two weeks of actually only reading things I disagree with.
I’ve been mostly reading books I already own, which has sort of been a problem, because books I already own fall into three categories:
(a) Books About Jesus, either because of my interest in the topic or Topher’s dark past as an atheist blogger
(b) Historically important books (Das Kapital, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Mein Kampf)
(c) Books that I definitely disagree with but that are, in a certain sense, part of my ingroup (Nick Kristof writes for the New York Times, Tyler Cowen is an econblogger).
I think (c) is a good thing to include a little of in the challenge, but if I just did that I would kind of be missing the point. So I’m going to be buying books in the future, and I encourage people to give me recommendations for more books (although I’m good on the Jesus books, really).
I have quit reading two books so far. I stopped reading The Progress Paradox when it turned out I agreed with Easterbrook and I had just been confused about what he meant by the word ‘happiness.’ I stopped reading Nobody Passes when I decided it was written by members of my ingroup, just members of my ingroup who are incredibly annoying. (If you went to an Ivy League school, you are not one of the most marginalized! If you grew up upper-middle-class, you are not one of the most marginalized! Your pain is legitimate even if it isn’t the worst pain in the world, but honestly, check your fucking privilege!)
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense: This is like reading a book written by me in a weird alternate universe in which I don’t believe it is necessary to only believe things that are true. Spufford repeatedly says that “it’s not possible to know for sure whether or not God exists”, even though he MENTIONS THE SEQUENCES IN A FOOTNOTE, so he has NO EXCUSE and should know EXACTLY WHY THAT DOES NOT WORK.
Spufford’s description of a spiritual experience is probably one of the most accurate ones I have read.
I definitely thought I had stopped being emotionally moved by Christianity because of my conversion to I-Do-What-I-Want-Ism but then I read this book and, yep, I’m still Jesus trash. Bleh. I think a key part of why I was moved by it is that Spufford does not characterize original sin as everything humans do being depraved and evil, but simply as humans in general having a tendency to be fuckups. As a fuckup, I relate.
One of the things I really like about Unapologetic is that Spufford winds up characterizing Jesus’s frankly absurd moral teaching as a product of Jesus being God. God is reckless self-sacrificial Love; God understands each person as an individual, and end rather than a means, in a way that humans simply can’t. So Jesus has these frankly weird parables, like the parable of the lost sheep: a shepherd who has a hundred sheep loses one and neglects all his other sheep to search everywhere to find it. The obvious response is “no, you don’t do that, at least not before you make sure all the other sheep are safely locked up in the sheep pen; 99 sheep is, in fact, more than one sheep, and if you don’t sacrifice one occasionally you’ll lose all of them.” But possession doesn’t really make intuitive sense to God, while He is acutely sensitive to loss. I personally think this is a fascinating reframe: a God that thinks in a really truly alien way, the way that, you know, the objective ground of being really would.
I also appreciate a story of the crucifixion that emphasizes Gethsemane and “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” This is probably because I’m lucky enough to have never experienced a huge amount of physical pain.
You can tell that Spufford is a Brit because he claims that only a tiny minority of Christians believe in Hell these days. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Disagreement: I am not a Christian.
On Guard: Defending Your Faith With Reason And Precision: uuuuuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I am really trying to read all the books in this challenge with an open mind, ready to understand other people’s point of view, but Craig’s arguments are SO DUMB.
First of all, Craig claims that it is impossible to avoid despair unless you are immortal and God exists. I feel like this is a remarkable position. Even the strongest anti-deathists I know aren’t going around saying that until the Singularity everyone should be depressed all the time. Also, he says that our actions don’t have any significance unless we are immortal, because eventually there will be the heat death of the universe. To which my response is the following piece of glurge:
A young man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach on which thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.
“Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?,” he asks.
“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”
“But, old man, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”
The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one.”
It is sort of embarrassing when your theology of suffering is less good than Oprah’s.
I do appreciate Craig’s use of Al-Ghazali; not enough people engage with medieval Muslim theology. That said, his arguments about how God must be the cause of the universe fall apart on closer examination. Time is a feature of this universe; there’s no reason to believe that causality applies before the beginning of the universe, no matter how confusing it is for us to understand how something would work without time. “What caused the universe?” may be a question as confused as “what is to the left of the universe?” (Craig dismisses this as the “taxicab fallacy” but offers no reason to believe that the argument is fallacious, except that causality has to extend before the universe because he says so.)
Craig argues that the universe cannot exist by necessity, because individual particles do not exist by necessity, and then a few pages later mentions that the fallacy of composition is a fallacy. Craig also, at one point, makes an argument about quantum mechanics, justifying one of his premises with “it seems obvious that.” Craig also seems to believe that minds are ‘simple’, more simple than laws of physics, so presumably he will have no problem programming us a Friendly artificial intelligence.
I think Craig’s section on objective moral values could use a bit of tabooing the word ‘morality’, ‘right’, and ‘wrong’. He argues that objective moral values exist because even if Hitler took over the world and everyone came to agree that the Holocaust was right, the Holocaust would still be wrong. But taboo “wrong”. It is true that no one would believe the Holocaust itself is wrong. But even if everyone was a Nazi, it would still be the case that the Holocaust involved the torture and death of millions of people, and that this was based on false ideas about the harm Jews cause, which means the torture and death led to no benefit. It is also the case that harm/care is an important aspect of innate and cross-cultural human morality, which means that nearly all humans disapprove of harming others for no benefit. Therefore, the Holocaust continues to go against what people would believe if they had all the facts.
Now, of course, it is possible that Naziism modifies people so that they no longer are moved by the harm/care aspect of morality. Modern liberals typically have weak to nonexistent degradation/purity and subversion/authority aspects, so this is possible. In that case, I would have to say that the Nazis are not doing anything wrong from the perspective of Nazis, but they are certainly doing something wrong from the perspective of me, and my perspective is the one I care about.
Craig argues that the fact that morality evolved doesn’t mean that our moral sense doesn’t reflect objective moral values (however poorly), in the same way that our physical senses reflect objective reality (however poorly). Of course, this is true. But there’s a solid evolutionary reason why our physical senses reflect reality: if they didn’t, we would be eaten. On the other hand, there’s no reason for us to evolve to pay attention to objective moral values, while there is a solid evolutionary reason for any social species to evolve to be loyal to our tribes, distribute goods fairly, not harm people, etc.
Craig’s resurrection argument seems to work from the puzzling implicit premise that Christianity is the only religion with historically documented miracles, which would no doubt be a surprise to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and practitioners of New Age religions. At no point does he discuss this obvious counterargument.
I can understand why Craig is such a good debater. All his arguments are wrong, but they’re subtly wrong in a way that makes it hard to explain exactly what’s wrong about them. For instance, Craig argues that objective moral values are the same sort of thing that mathematical objects are: just like “seven” exists even though it is not tangible, “goodness” can exist even though it is not tangible. The problem with defending against this argument is that first you have to explain what mathematical Platonism is, then you have to explain that there are alternative theories, then you have to explain why people believe the alternate theories, and by then the entire audience has fallen asleep.
Disagreement: I am not a Christian.
Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality: A Study Guide for Episcopalians: This is an interesting book about how Episcopalians (members of a church that is broadly in favor of gay marriage and connected to a denomination which is mostly not) should think about gay marriage.
One thing I found really interesting was the emphasis on diversity in both senses of the term: both the acceptance of gay people and the acceptance of people with differing viewpoints on LGBT issues. It was striking to me how often criticism of other Episcopalians for not valuing diversity meant not “this person is a homophobe” but “this person is attempting to schism the church because other people think gay people are okay.”
The Episcopalian sexual ethics was described as follows:
This suggests that in evaluating a relationship we must ask which key components are present and whether they are expressed in ways appropriate to that relationship. Mutual regard, respect, and truthfulness are minimums for any relationship. Relationships that are more than fleeting ought also to involve responsibility, loyalty, accountability, attentiveness, and availability. Long-enduring relationships require commitment, fidelity, reciprocity, forgiveness, and generativity.
Which I actually feel is a statement I would cosign as a sex-positive atheist. (However, as far as I can tell from this book, Episcopalians seem to be down on casual sex; they seem to believe that sex is best saved for long-enduring relationships, which I do disagree with. Unfortunately, since the book was mostly about gayness, it did not enlighten me about the crux of our disagreement.)
One of the articles about Scripture brought up polygamy as an example of how the marriage that God approves of is culturally constructed, and I was about to comment on how surprisingly poly-accepting that was until I read the discussion questions and polygamy was listed next to slave marriage as something “we find repugnant in our own day.” Bleh.
The argument that gay marriage isn’t blasphemous, what’s really blasphemous is marrying couples who aren’t really Christian and just want a picturesque wedding, made me giggle.
The article from a South African had a definite air of “Notice how we were RIGHT about apartheid? Notice how we are, like, the only Anglican denomination to play a major role in a civil rights struggle in the last fifty years? Archbishop Desmond Tutu is awesome!” Large parts of it were devoted to passive-aggressively pointing out that nobody schismed the South African church over “some Anglicans engaged in human rights atrocities against black people” and thus Episcopalians can damn well accept that some people are performing gay marriages.
Disagreement: I am not a Christian.
Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War: Recommended to me by an article in the American Conservative; apparently written by one of the intellectual leading lights of the alt-right. The premise of the novel is that America’s cultural Marxist infestation leads to its collapse and division into several subcountries. New England wounds up getting run by alt-righters and therefore is the Good Guy Country. The other regions of the US do not, and therefore have to be nobly righted by Our Hero The General Staff Person. To be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
The author appears to very much overestimate the number of deep greens and radical feminists in the United States. Deep greens not only present a problem for the Northern Confederation (where they are summarily executed) but also wind up running Cascadia (Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). Radical feminists, conversely, wind up running California, where they ban all sex other than lesbianism and require schools to give women better grades for the same work. I am tempted to write a fanfic in which it is revealed that Our Hero The General Staff Person was extremely confused about everything and in fact California was run by queer theory people. The heterosexuality ban will be because heterosexuality is a social construct and clearly everyone could be gay if they wanted to; most people just decide they’re nonbinary and date as they would anyway. Also, the reason their military is so high-tech is that once they decided only women would run the military all of their military vets were trans women.
I mean, that’s still not great, but it’s at least slightly more plausible.
Muslims in this book are constantly crucifying Christians, which I am pretty sure does not happen? I admit I am not the most up-to-date about Muslim persecution of Christians, but skimming the Wikipedia page on the subject it mostly seems to be “Muslims had very good attitudes about religious freedom in the Middle Ages but have unfortunately kept the same attitudes while Christians were busy having the Enlightenment and thus it now seems really backwards,” which I don’t think implies they are going to crucify people. (I do, uh, appreciate (?) Saudi Arabia’s rules lawyering by declaring every citizen of Saudi Arabia to be Muslim and therefore all non-Muslim religious practice is apostasy.) I mean, Islamophobes are constantly calling people dhimmis, you’d think they know what that means.
Victoria is not exactly in favor of Nazis, but it is nowhere near as down on Nazis as I would generally hope people are. For instance, it is very strongly opposed to deep greens and to radical feminists, but the Nazis (who briefly run Wisconsin) are written as “well, we don’t LIKE concentration camps, but you certainly do have to admire their competence…” The hero’s mentor explains that he doesn’t want to help the Nazis not because he dislikes their anti-Semitism but because Nazis are far too modern.
I also find the racial politics interesting. There is exactly one Jewish character, who appears for one paragraph to assure the reader that he wants to join the Christian Marine Corps because he knows that “Christian” really refers to our shared Judeo-Christian values. The good black characters realize that in order to prevent the scourge of black-on-black crime all crimes committed by black people must be punished with hanging, and it must be illegal for black people to have children unless they are farmers. In general, this book has a strange tendency to trot out members of marginalized groups to explain that Insert Policy That Seems Kind Of Repressive Here is actually the best thing for them. (We also have a woman explaining that keeping a home is actually more important than the jobs people have outside the home. Personally, my feeling is that since keeping a home is such an important job we should free up men to do it if they want to too.)
I am informed by this book that getting the alt-right people to run everything means we will have very good trains, which is honestly giving me so much internal conflict.
Disagreement: Honestly, what DON’T I disagree with this book about?
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide: First of all, the title is a Mao quote. Seriously? A leader whose actions led to horrific human rights abuses and the death of tens of millions of people is not an appropriate source of pithy quotes. Hitler said “the frailest woman will become a heroine when the life of her own child is at stake”, so I assume that Kristof is going to write a book about children’s health next and call it The Frailest Woman.
Awful choice of title aside: Kristof’s book is an odd combination of good shit and bad shit. He talks about the importance of evidence and randomized controlled trials in choosing where to give, points out that poorly targeted aid can do more harm than good, and even name-checks Givewell. But his anecdotes feature multiple people who turned out to be frauds, like Somaly Mam and Greg Mortenson, and those are just the ones I recognize. He rarely gives statistics, preferring to list off a mind-numbing array of horrifying stories without giving any sense of how representative they are. When he does give statistics, they are often poorly contextualized; he presents as authoritative numbers which are estimates or simply made up. He talks about the importance of giving Westerners an opportunity to come to Africa and help (ugh) and praises multiple charities which he recognizes are ineffective for the good work they do improving the moral character of Americans (UUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH).
I find it striking that progressives try to ban loans offered to poor people at 20-30% interest in the United States, but in developing countries they’re so fond of them that they donate money to charity to allow the poor to get more of them. Like, surely either 30% interest is exploitative or it’s not. Anyway, I think microfinance sucks and people’s fondness for it is this bizarre Protestant work ethic shit, and you should give money to cash transfers instead.
The big disagreement I knew about going in was about sex work. Kristof supports the criminalization of sex work because he believes that sex work in developing countries is almost always coerced. His preferred charities teach women career skills other than sewing, despite the rejection of this form of charity by many sex workers in the developing world. He discusses the tragedy that ‘rescued’ girls return to sex work. He writes:
It’s enormously dispiriting for well-meaning aid workers who oversee a brothel raid to take the girls back to a shelter and give them food and medical care, only to see the girls climb over the back wall.
I have so many issues with this! Like, first of all, how come the people you’re helping can’t walk out the front door if they don’t want to be there? Why are you making people escape from you? Second of all, if the people you are helping are trying to escape from you, you have a Problem. I am not saying that this is necessarily a “they don’t want to be helped” problem– Kristof blames it on the women being addicted to drugs and afraid of their pimps, in which case it would probably be solvable with bodyguards and methadone– but you have a serious issue if the people you are trying to help are running away!
I think there’s a lot to be done with an intersectional feminist analysis of global poverty and health in the developing world, which comes from a strong background of skepticism, empiricism, and a desire for evidence. I really wish someone would write it. Half the Sky is, unfortunately, not that book.
Disagreement: I am neither a whorephobe nor an ineffective altruist.
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will Eventually Feel Better: I thought I 100% disagreed with the great stagnation hypothesis, but I think I just kept arguing about it with idiots. Cowen makes a much stronger case in this book, including arguing with my “but the Internet?” objection. (The Internet is one technology, not many; it creates far fewer jobs than many other technologies, mostly relying on the free labor of its users.)
My one objection is that I would have appreciated it if this book were about ten times more rigorous. For instance, Cowen’s primary thesis– that there have been few technological innovations in the past few decades– is mostly justified by saying “look around you, my grandmother’s life changed remarkably due to technology, but my life has stayed pretty much the same in the last few decades.” While this might be true, I’d prefer a more careful examination of the rate of innovation with, like, numbers and stuff.
That said, it’s an interesting hypothesis and I’d appreciate a more rigorous discussion of it.
Disagreement: when I started this book I did not agree with the great stagnation hypothesis.
Thing of Things 
If you want a much more rigorous treatment of productivity stagnation, check out Bob Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It’s about 10x as long as Cowen’s pamphlet.
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Thanks! I’ll check it out after the challenge is over.
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Here’s an article about it by Paul Krugman: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html
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Thank you for your very attractive review of Spufford’s book – I think I’m going to read it too! (Disclaimer: I’m a Christian, so it won’t be for an epistemic closure challenge.)
Also, to build off a tangent, thanks for your comment on microfinance. I have a small amount of money on loan with Kiva, and I’m now considering moving it to the Small Enterprise Foundation (GiveWell’s least-unrecommended microfinance group.) I appreciate the advantages of simple grants, but would giving one grant really be better than giving loans which can be re-lent to others after the first borrower repays them?
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It was striking to me how often criticism of other Episcopalians for not valuing diversity meant not “this person is a homophobe” but “this person is attempting to schism the church because other people think gay people are okay.”
As someone who was an interested observer on the outside during the Anglican Wars over this, eh heh. Eh heh. Eh heh heh heh heh heh. Setting aside the fact that Episcopalians holding up their hands in horror over schism when (a) Anglicanism resulted from a schism within Western Catholicism (b) the Episcopal church in the USA further broke away from the Church of England during the American Revolution (and they rather like referring to how they bravely went with the new dispensation and broke with the mother church) is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, I think your excerpt of the smuggery about “We are on the right side of history” re: apartheid etc. is spot-on with the attitudes in question.
To say that this is special pleading is probably being the most charitable I can be about it. I’m not Anglican or Episcopalian but there were some nasty instances of calling Global South primates* pretty much everything bar outright “dumb savages that need to be civilised fast by we enlightened Westerners” on the part of the progressives pushing for these changes. But it’s a very tangled mess and none of my church business.
*Some ‘humorists’ made jokes about “primates” with pictures of apes, because primates and primates, geddit? Would have been a lot funnier if the primates in question weren’t the African bishops that for some strange and unaccountable reason didn’t think Scripture sanctioned gay sex, and there was some rowing back about “no, no, we meant the English” when this was pointed out. Didn’t much help when one of the English archbishops, who is a conservative and not down with the gay marriage thing, is also Ugandan.
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Okay, so, I don’t know if shilling my shit is frowned upon here, but I thought this post might be mutually beneficial, because I think this might be fun and in keeping with the challenge.
If you’re looking for something pulpy and light to include in your Epistemic Closure Challenge, and you haven’t yet read my HPMOR fic Ginny Weasley And The Sealed Intelligence, I cordially invite you to. It’s a relatively short, complete HPMOR sequel fic written from (my own) explicitly Christian perspective.
Do I count as part of your in-group or not? I don’t know. I don’t live in the Bay Area and haven’t met any of you. But I have followed the LW diaspora communities for years and am a semi-regular commentor on this blog. However, it is highly probable, to understate the point, that you disagree with me on critical and important issues.
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I read your fic!
I liked the basilisk calculator idea, and thought it was engagingly written. It was certainly thought-provoking.
I also think that there were some weak points, most notably that Ginny doesn’t respond to Harry’s arguments at the end. I also think that Harry seems like a bit of a strawman; in the original story he’s arrogant, but he has also improved and grown as a character. Hermione in particular doesn’t seem to be considered. The final chapter didn’t make sense to me- it might have gotten too abstract.
Also, I remember that some of Ginny’s logic seemed off, but I don’t quite remember the issue with it.
Lesath is also quite OOC. I don’t think he was self-confident enough to try to hit on girls, nor did I think that his suicide was ever explained in-universe.
If you would like me to read over it again and critique it/engage with it more thoroughly, I’d be happy to, though possibly a bit unreliable.
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You know what? I’ll read your fic. I commented on the earlier thread that I would just be miserable hate-reading things I don’t agree with, but I guess something written by a commenter here AND based on HPMOR would probably be somewhat less likely to make me hate everything.
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I… am not sure whether you will like it or not. It’s likely not like what you’re expecting.
John is a Christian, as far as I am aware, and the book has explicit (and clearly didactic) arguments concerning God’s existence. The characterization is sometimes inconsistent (as I mentioned above).
I hope that these statements and criticisms are both fair and not too harsh, John?
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Not too harsh at all. I DID plot out the whole thing in a day and write it in a month in between my high school classes all to “cash in” on HPMOR ending; in that context I’m just happy that it’s *decent*. As for the ideology, that was why I was advertising it in the Epistemic Closure Challenge thread. 😀
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Would I need to read the entire book to get that description, or is it a particular chapter? People keep talking about spiritual experience, and I’m doing my best in being open-minded about it, and working under the assumption that people can experience emotions that I don’t, but I’m still very confused about what the heck they mean by it. So I would really appreciate the opportunity to read a good description thereof.
I think he has a point here. There are probably some people who would do just fine in the face of death. This is evidenced by the fact that some people commit non-impulsive suicide, including asking for termination of life support. And some of them probably truly understand that death is the end. But I strongly suspect that most people don’t really alieve their mortality, and that’s how they manage to be on good terms with it. They might have some not-even-religious vague quasi-afterlife ideas about death as transcendence of some sort, of death as calamity and rest, of some Other Side Where You Meet Your Late Grandparents, or perhaps they don’t even have any ideas of this sort, and they just don’t even think of death in sufficient detail, and when they think they do, they’re actually thinking of something else. Like I remember Steve Jobs saying something along the lines of “I used to think that I was Enlightened, understanding the finitude of life, and living every day like it was my last one, but when I got actually diagnosed with cancer, I got scared shitless, and all I could think of was `I don’t wanna die!`” I, for one, am certainly doing a combination of: (1) alieving far higher odds of brain preservation working than I believe they are; (2) not thinking of death too hard – which is weird, because I at least briefly think of mortality almost every other day, but despite always concluding “yep, that shit is super bad”, I don’t emotionally perceive it this way, while after each of the few times I was getting close calls with cars while riding a bike I was feeling sufficiently scared that I spending the rest of the day in bed.
Do they though? There seems to be plenty of guilt by association mentality, that very much looks like accusations of impurity. If an artist turns out to be a rapist or abuser, everyone must stop liking this artist’s works, or they become Problematic themselves. If someone jerks off to cartoons depicting or literature describing things that would be terrible IRL such as abuse, rape (including rape of minors), torture, murder, etc. they they’re a sick pervert, who is supporting all these things IRL, and therefore are terrible. What is that if not degradation/purity axis?
Sounds like a good time to read books by Maoists and/or Stalinists? How about https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm ?
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IIRC, it’s chapter two. The description of a spiritual experience starts with him sitting in a church.
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>>Do they though? There seems to be plenty of guilt by association mentality, that very much looks like accusations of impurity. If an artist turns out to be a rapist or abuser, everyone must stop liking this artist’s works, or they become Problematic themselves. If someone jerks off to cartoons depicting or literature describing things that would be terrible IRL such as abuse, rape (including rape of minors), torture, murder, etc. they they’re a sick pervert, who is supporting all these things IRL, and therefore are terrible. What is that if not degradation/purity axis?
Yes, SJ-type liberals tend to have a lot of degradation/purity morality in my experience as well.
By the way, what are these axes from? I feel as though I’m missing out on something terribly interesting.
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Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory.
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I think of Social Justice, or at least the worst parts of it, as what you get when someone with a conservative’s underlying way of thinking has had liberal object-level beliefs pounded into them, and tries to reconcile the two. If you’re ever looking at an SJ rant going “I’m glad you’re against the forms of racism you happen to be familiar with, but you don’t seem to have a problem with the fundamental thing that makes racism wrong – treating people as less than human based on unchosen group membership”, this is what I think is going on.
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I would argue that there are plenty of people who just happen to be born into one tribe and try to reconcile their inherent values with tribal culture, even though they would actually fit in better with the other tribe.
In fact, I think that this will increase, as we see an increasing (regional) hatred for the other tribe. So those who are indoctrinated into one tribe, simply cannot imagine that the other tribe has anything to offer and as they consume media that tells them the worst about the other tribe, this keeps getting reinforced.
So they will instead seek a position within their own tribe that matches their own values. For instance, certain people become SJWs, but IMO they could just as easily have become white supremacists.
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There’s a theory holding that modern liberals haven’t lost degradation/purity so much as shifted it over to food rather than sex – looking down on people who pollute their bodies with processed, non-organic, non-vegan, etc. foods rather than people who pollute their bodies with promiscuity. Be interesting to consider integrating the SJ stuff with that theory.
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How about the modern leftish tendency to call ideas they disagree with and people who espouse them “gross”? That seems to clearly come from the degradation/purity space.
Recent example: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/12/09/trump_s_labor_secretary_pick_is_a_gross_misogynist_really_into_hot_women.html
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A few years ago, I was still going to church with my parents because it would be entirely too much hassle to fight them on it, and I was going to move out shortly anyways. I connivingly finagled my way into a non-agonizing Sunday morning by first playing the church orchestra for the first service (so I’m getting to play music and skip out on the sermon), and then argued my way out of Sunday school by hanging out in the church library instead. Which meant curiously reading a bunch of stuff I didn’t agree with, and trying to find the good stuff. Originally I was going to tackle some of the juicy Problem of Job/Evil stuff, but my first book was Marriage on Trial, by Stanton and Maier, copyright 2004, and then after that I started reading Foundation instead, and then I moved and no longer had to attend church, so.
But yeah, church libraries can be and interesting resource, especially since Bay Area church libraries might be more likely to have books with writing geared towards interesting apologetics.
As for Marriage on Trial, it was kind of cute how much they were trying not to preach to the choir, and take a lower-case-r rational argumentative approach. Unfortunately, the format was to present a motte, and then seriously undercut themselves in the “layman’s explanation” portion with pretty much every fallacy under the sun. Not making a bailey, mind you, they’re not good enough to practice Dark Arts, but just elaborating on their motte badly. I went in with making counterarguments in mind, but spent most of the time thinking of how I could argue their positions so much better.
This book being published in 2004, Stanton and Maier write under some assumptions since rendered moot. This includes, yes, a reference to that since-retracted Spitzer endorsement of de-gaying.
Cannot recommend this book, only part one is somewhat interesting, parts two through the end are sloppily-written standard anti-gay arguments from the early 2000s.
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>>then after that I started reading Foundation instead
I’m surprised that they had Asimov in their library- or was this a different book?
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Nah, I was bringing Foundation from home.
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Progressives have strong purity and authority aspects, though both they and their opponents tend to not identify them as such. Food purity (organic, non-GMO, weird diets, etc), environmentalism (apart from the “we need to manage public goods more carefully” kind), sometimes sex-negativity (they try to pass it off as harm/fairness, but so do conservatives), etc. As for authority, some care about the authority of Science in the abstract, some about the word of marginalized groups, many love teachers, and (if it counts) they care a lot about the authority of The People as a whole.
I suspect that not caring about loyalty/authority/purity is more of a contrarian trait than a progressive one. In my anecdotal experience, red-state progressives and blue-state conservatives are more similar to each other in that respect than either of them is to their co-ideologists from states in which they’re more dominant. And libertarians, who are dominant nowhere, are lowest in those traits.
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I believe those examples are compatible with liberals as a group tending not to have particularly strong purity intuitions. For one thing, liberals tend not to be moved by thought experiments which typically trigger the purity foundation cross-culturally (e.g. incest, eating pets); if someone had a harm/care foundation that was only triggered by people feeling insulted, but was not triggered by assault, starvation, chronic pain, dementia, etc., I think it would be fair to characterize it as ‘weak.’ In addition, many– I would argue most– liberals have consequentialist environmental intuitions and no food purity intuitions; the existence of some liberals with purity intuitions does not mean that the average liberal has them.
Libertarians typically only have liberty/oppression, IIRC.
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WRT book recommendations:
How badly do you want to be offended?
If you just want to rage a bit, you could go with:
– Intimidation Game – How the left is silencing America
or
– Silencing – How the left is killing free speech
One of the two will do, they’re pretty much the same.
If you have absolutely no limits, there’s always
– SJWs always lie
All of these are reasonably well written and fairly internally consistent, so it should be the ideas that are most offensive.
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There’s a book called “The End of Feminism: how a woman is different from a person” (it’s nice(?) to have a reminder that some people aren’t feminists even in the sense of the radical belief that women are people), but (un)fortunately, to my knowledge, it only exists in Russian.
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Oh, wait a minute, but another one – this: http://www.oocities.org/protopop_1999/treatise.html – is translated (although poorly)! It presents the most obnoxious kind of justifying sexism and the belief that “nice guys finish last” by means of amateur evo psych.
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I am trying NOT to be offended! I am trying to gain insight into the viewpoints of others different from me and maybe even develop more nuanced viewpoints!
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OK, replace “how offended” with “how different do you want the viewpoints to be” and the rest of the comment is still valid.
I don’t think you’ll develop any new viewpoints from those books, as they are probably too far outside your Overton window, but if you want to experience wildly different viewpoints (perhaps in an anthropological sense?), those are some.
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I don’t know about Craig, but this is very close to what I mean by “objective moral values”. Moral realism is not necessarily moral Platonism. Moral realism does not imply a natural law. It just means that morality is the same for all people. If you judge things against “what people would believe if they had all the facts” you are a moral realist.
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That definition of moral realism doesn’t get you God, though, which is what Craig is trying to use it for. (He is, in fact, a moral Platonist AFAIK.)
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That’s completely fair.
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Also: If you disagree with Das Kapital to the point of putting it in your list of examples, I suspect you will disagree with Stiglitz (who to be clear is not a Marxist, he’s just definitely to the left). I haven’t read every book on that list, but given views I know you hold I suspect you will most disagree with the earlier books on the list.
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I have read Stiglitz and I don’t disagree with him enough to be comfortable including him. Also, reading Stiglitz *really* doesn’t achieve the goal of reading people who are definitely outside my ingroup; he has, for instance, written for the New York Times. Like I said, I’m not ruling those people out, but I’m also not going to spend money on their books when there’s a whole world of people I have fundamental worldview differences with out there.
My primary disagreement with Das Kapital is that when its viewpoints were enacted millions of people died. My understanding is that this is not true of Stiglitz.
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Very slowly working on Eve Tushnet, so far not that impressed, although she has redeemed herself slightly from an initial very negative impression.
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Re innovation, you might be interested in https://artir.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/no-great-technological-stagnation/
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>Muslims in this book are constantly crucifying Christians, which I am pretty sure does not happen?
ISIS do it. I don’t know who the Muslims in the book are or what the context is.
>Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
You keep referring to this book as “Kristof”, but I’m pretty sure he co-authored it with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.
(Certainly she’s listed as one of the authors on Amazon and Google Books.)
In a random coincidence, I only know this because I attributed a quote from Half the Sky to him on Tumblr and then noticed I’d gotten it wrong when I looked up the context, a couple of days ago. Never heard of either of them before that.
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A couple of “book” reports:
The Ungoverned, by Vernor Vinge. Not actually a book, but a short story.
It presents a really emotionally compelling picture of anarcho-capitalism as a real thing that can actually exist, helped by the villains being non-strawmen people from a liberal democracy.
The biggest issue with this is that it’s a sci-fi story; the post-apocalyptic tech levels feel find of forced, like they might be designed to make the society possible in the first place, which I don’t think was the intent. It’s set in an established future-history from some of Vinge’s books, which I caught more of the second time.
Unfortunately I found this much less enjoyable than the first time I read it. I think it might have been a mistake to rush into re-reading something I read so recently for the challenge.
Amelia by TanaNari. Also not a book, but a book-left fanfic.
I picked this because it contains a lot of Worm headcanons I don’t share, which seems in the spirit of the thing, and because I heard it was anti-transhumanist and very well-written.
It is anti-transhumanist, I think. Although it’s hard to tell behind of all the transhumanism. It’s treated like a dreadful necessity by everyone and kept to a minimum, while I’m screaming “just do more of it! It’s fun!” … but it’s Worm, so “dreadful necessity” means “about half the story”. (Yeah, only half, this is a very wish-fulfillment Worm fanfic.) There’s no real attempt to justify the anti-transhumanism, either, it’s just kind of taken as a given.
However, I ran into another disagreement. One of the Awful Fanfic Tropes it includes is shipping the straight protagonist with her worst enemy while loudly pretending that every single character is supermodel-level attractive. (Taylor Hebert, who is pointed not supposed to be attractive, is literally compared to a supermodel several times.)
Worse yet, they actually remembered she’s straight, so we get a Psychic Pairbond Romance where she realizes that she wants to turn gay for her One True Love.
… and it’s actually … very romantic?
My liberal sensibilities were deeply irritated by the idea of forcing yourself to be with someone you aren’t compatible with. (It’s emphasised pretty heavily that Taylor is entirely 100% straight and repulsed by so much as kissing her fiancee.) And the psychic-pairbond thing is played for horror, which doesn’t exactly help.
But … it actually presents a weirdly compelling case for romance with people you’re actively repulsed by as even more romantic, because you romantically work to overcome it. I’ve seen this claimed before by xenophiles and conservative homophobes, but it never really *clicked* for me before now as a mental concept that can make intuitive sense.
I’m not a very romantic person, and even if I was I’m still not convinced this is a great idea. But this does make me feel more inclined toward bihacking, and more sympathetic toward the “ex-gay” crowd.
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