Comment by miyoji
14 hours ago
The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers.
I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
About 70% of American adults can name all three branches of government.
That leaves about 81m Americans who cannot. I'm sure you were a very clever 8yo, many of the people here spent a lot of their childhood being told they were clever. That said, suggesting that the other 30% of the country less clever than 8yo you should be excluded from political discussions is somewhat illiberal in my mind. Perhaps the notion we're creeping toward is that people less educated don't deserve a political voice or to take part in political exchange, which is a tenet I wouldn't agree with.
[1] https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-knowled...
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Having valid opinions about politics and engaging with the existing political system are not the same thing. I am super happy to chat about political questions (of all sorts) irrespective of my interest in voting.
Note that when I say "talk politics" I really mean "discuss things controlled by politicians", not "discuss politicians". If you mean the latter it is a super fair bar to set!
>It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient.
It's the fizzbuzz of political debate.
You are filtering out politically engaged people who have assesed the current mechanisms of state to be too flawed to be worth continued interaction.
This is likely quite a large group.
This particular test might be reasonable, but at some point you're just filtering out anyone who's not in your bubble, which is a problem when your beliefs are extreme because your bubble is tiny.
Imagine a Marxist who refuses to discuss economics with anyone who can't explain dialectic materialism or enclosure.
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> and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
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We all learned what the 3 branches are in grade school. Some people forgot it. Liberals are more likely to remember it because liberal discourse (this thread for example) reminds them of it. It's a biased litmus test in other words.
It's inconceivable to me that you could forget the three branches. There are still headlines and news articles about the president , congress, and the supreme court. Those three things , talked about constantly, are a basic reminder of the most visible aspects of each branch.
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It is indeed important to know about ones government - not just its branches, but also its misdeeds and crimes.
The national secrecy is a cess pool of corruption in any and all governments - the corruption of all government begins with its secrets - a truly free people don't allow their governments to keep secrets, but encourages governance to have a responsibility of protecting the truth over secrecy - and this, under the knowledge that absolutes are unattainable. Of course, nuclear codes need to be made inaccessible; the more the people know about their government, the less corrupt it is, however.
After all, do you know why your government hates Russia, like, legislatively - as opposed to culturally and all the other distractions from governance.
The issue is, the overlying principle is that modern governments must allow the people to survive extremism. Political systems, designed to combat the extremes of mass survival, reach a point where they, too, are extreme. As is also born in the history of other forms of human organization - religion, and so on. The very thing the subject was started to address, becomes it in the end.
Basic knowledge is one thing. But constant awareness is something else. We must always hold our governments and their agency, accountable. It is true of priests and politicians and scientists and icons, alike.
It’s probably not necessary to know what the administrative structure of your government is in order to hold an opinion on politics. It’s more important to understand things like the different ideas and ideologies, and what concrete evidence actually exists to support whatever legislation you’re interested in. And pretty much nobody has sufficient political knowledge to do this.
There are zillions upon zillions of domain specific smart people with many totally batshit beliefs (pick a billionaire, any billionaire except Buffett). There are also plenty of approaching polymaths also with wackadoodle beliefs on particular subjects too. I'd say that well-rounded reasonableness and "common sense" in more areas than most is rare and skews towards wide-ranging life experiences, average intelligence, and advanced age. There are only a few wise elders who have figured out many things, not everything.
And no one will ever agree with you on everything. Anyone who agrees with you on everything is lying to you a priori or you're hallucinating them.
If you want to read someone the article author characterizes as #1 (Objects to Marxism) and #2 (Knows enough to carefully and reasonably refute Marxism) I'd recommend James Lindsay's New Discourses podcast and website. He's read all the leftist books and is deeply familiar with all their ideas and terminology, but is about as anti-communist as they come. Interestingly, he has a lot of people on what he calls the "Woke Right" (e.g Tucker Carlson) who also hate him.
> Interestingly, he has a lot of people on what he calls the "Woke Right" (e.g Tucker Carlson) who also hate him.
Is that interesting? I get accused of being a labour supporter in conservative areas and conservative in more left leaning areas.
It's all part of the problem being discussed. If you don't precisely agree with someone, you must be one of 'them', and when you're in the middle, or have nuanced views, both extremes disagree with you.
> Conspiracy theory promotion
> Lindsay has promoted several conspiracy theories. He is a proponent of the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory and has been credited as one of several public figures responsible for popularizing "groomer" as a slur directed at LGBTQ educators and activists by members of the political right. Lindsay has referred to the Pride flag as "the flag of a hostile enemy".
> In 2021, Lindsay wrote on Twitter that "there will be" a genocide of whites if critical race theory "isn't stopped." His statement was met with widespread criticism, including from founder of libertarian anti-identity politics magazine Quillette Claire Lehmann who wrote: "James Lindsay is now peddling White Genocide Theory. Implying that a genocide against whites in the U.S. is imminent has the potential to inspire racist violence. Such comments are extreme, reckless, and irresponsible. They should be denounced." Lindsay has also promoted the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which alleges a concerted effort by Marxist critical theorists to undermine Western civilization using Marxism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Lindsay?wprov=sfla1
Anti-Marxists really aren't sending their best. I don't see how this guy can produce a thoughtful response to Marxism if he believes that there exists a secret cabal trying to push "Cultural Marxism" on the West to destroy it.
To respect TFA's point, I will not use this moron's existence as evidence that leftist economics are correct.
He reads difficult dense books that are the academic foundation of leftism all the way through and takes them seriously. When prominent theorists write books and these books are taught to 10s of thousands in universities, this is what leftists actually believe.
Leftists make the stuff in their dense jargon heavy books so extreme that it becomes anti-mimetic. People say that the statements he reads out of these books, once translated from very dense jargon, are conspiracy theories, but that's basically gaslighting to get people to not pay attention to acknowledged leftist tactics and to disbelieve what's actually in the books they are teaching to kids and are using to train the next generations of teachers and leftist policymakers.
Communists get voted in because people don't really think their extreme rhetoric is serious, but once they seize power they actually behave just like they say they would in their books.
You're also not engaging with his argument. You're just saying someone said he said a category of things I don't like, but if he read it out of a popular leftist theory book then that's just reporting on what the actual left is saying and to say that repeating that is somehow being a conspiracy theorist is how this stuff comes into actually being implemented. People refuse to believe communists like Hasan Piker are serious until it's too late.
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