Comments on: Open Minded Activists?

By: FL1990

FL1990 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:14:44 +0000

Thanks. For some reason I just could not wrap my head around what was meant there.

By: Dain

Dain — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:52:30 +0000

It means rendering a decision that something that occured was the result of open-minded, spontaneous exploration and then attempting to preserve the conditions that led to that result, undermining the anti-traditional and anti-conservative ethos.

By: FL1990

FL1990 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:35:40 +0000

…preserving the alleged result of…

Forgiving me for being dense but what does that even mean?

By: stephen

stephen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:08:45 +0000

At first it seemed as though Jost was just slapping another name on status quo bias, then he eventually trailed off into the false consiousness bull shit.

It was rather embarrassing watching him try to wiggle around the fact the super-cultural non-conformity is basically just sub-cultural conformity of a certain kind.

All in all, a waste of an hour.

By: Dr. Horsemeat

Dr. Horsemeat — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:43:33 +0000

In other words, when liberals do it, it’s transgressive, when conservatives do it, it’s oppressive, and when anybody else does it, it’s just a personal kink.

By: SFG

SFG — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:24:49 +0000

I don’t know about popular, but it seems to keep popping up more and more often in the ridiculous lefty things I read. They seem to be positioning themselves as the next ’sexual minority’ after the gays.

http://www.alternet.org/sex/

Look at the extreme right-hand corner of the banner.

Or maybe I just wasted too much time reading Salon, which after all is published in San Fran.

Ohmancomeon: Yup…pretty much the same situation as gays, I think. Makes sense; conservatism is about tradition, after all.

By: Sister Y

Sister Y — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:48:21 +0000

Right-wingers into BDSM have to be on the super DL. The “out” ones are all lefties.

By: teageegeepea

teageegeepea — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:14:02 +0000

I think Oakeshott made a similar objection to Friedrich Hayek's writings, because he had turned his advocacy of freedom into a system. Similarly, George Soros now damns "market fundamentalists" in Popperian terms. SFG, I think I resemble your red-state libertarian. Except I'm really just indifferent to gay rights, currently live in a blue state and merely hope to move to a red one. I also didn't know BDSM was popular among "super-lefties". I figured feminists would object, and anyway in their behavior many who advocate social liberalism are quite bourgeois in behavior.

By: SFG

SFG — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:25:14 +0000

It’s as much of a social thing as anything else, I think. People need to be around other people who share their interests and values. That’s a normal human need and I wouldn’t wag my finger too strongly.

So if someone explores too strongly and finds that some old-fashioned things are OK, his ‘open-minded’ friends are going to look down on him…more likely, he keeps his mouth shut or finds some way around it. (I’m convinced that the popularity of BDSM among super-lefties is a way for feminists to enjoy the ‘caveman sex’ their political conventions tell them is wrong–male domination bad, kink(=deviance=being different) good.)

Also, there are certain interests which correlate with openness to experience; the arts positively, sports negatively, for example. So even though I’m anti-immigration and believe in HBD, I’d rather keep my mouth shut than move to a red-state small town full of guys who are convinced that anyone who doesn’t love football is gay. (I imagine somewhere there’s a red-state libertarian who thinks gay rights is OK but doesn’t want to move to some horrible huge city where he has no space, can’t go hunting or fishing, and has to spend hundreds of dollars on clothing.) For all the different ways America theoretically allows you to be an American, you really have to pick from a few options. Still, having both Provo and San Francisco is, I think, one of the strengths of our nation; we’re cosmopolitan enough to attract talented scientists, etc. from around the world and provincial enough to have a strong military. Our large geographic size allows us to spread these different sorts of people out so they don’t kill each other.