RationalWiki talk:What is going on in the blogosphere?/Archive13

Bahaha bahahaa haha
Poor Yolo Minneapolis Milo Yiannopoulos 'more than $2m in debt', Australian promoters' documents show

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/03/milo-yiannopoulos-more-than-2m-in-debt-australian-promoters-documents-show Cardinal Chang (talk) 15:10, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

And it gets fucking better, Milo Yiannopoulos banned from crowdfunding site Patreon

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/06/milo-yiannopoulos-banned-from-crowdfunding-site-patreon

Can someone add this to the right news section. Cardinal Chang (talk) 21:55, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Douthat
Did you mean to post that in CLOGS? 𝔊𝔬𝔞𝔱-𝔈𝔪𝔭𝔢𝔯𝔬𝔯 𝔅𝔦𝔤𝔰 (𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔡𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔴𝔦𝔰𝔡𝔬𝔪/𝔞𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔰) 03:26, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I wondered about that, and figured it might be better received there. That said, I am at least in partial agreement with the piece; the old WASP aristocracy, whatever their flaws, was at least better for the country than rule by high-strung Internet billionaires and investment bank backstabbers, for reasons I explained with rather similar reasoning:

The great paleo-liberal dream of "meritocracy", where rank and status are the result of a game played fair, is inherently sexist.... This is one of the reasons why I find the idea of hereditary aristocracy attractive, and think that having such a thing as an ingredient of a political system is not obviously beneath consideration. It isn't about restoring some kind of natural order in which lords rule over serfs. It's about placing obstacles in the way of ambition and social climbing. It's about achieving a steady state societyWikipedia's W.svg.

The aristocratic belief of landed gentry and hidalgos that mere servile trade was something beneath them is an anti-commercial value system that has been shown to be relatively sustainable over time. It will, of course, be accompanied by a generous dose of hypocrisy, just like any other human value system.

Even powerful people are unfree to the extent that markets run their lives. The chief executive officer of General Motors is an ironmonger. She must cultivate the public's favor to get them to buy her wares. To that extent, she is not her own person. To the extent that she buys and sells things -- that she participates in a marketplace -- she is unfree. Look at the scandals that have overtaken Uber and similar startups. Travis Kalanick was apparently not mighty enough to tell the world to go blow its nose. Consider the words of a true aristocrat among men, St. Ignatius: "Employers sense in me a denial of their values … they fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe.”

I want this aristocracy to exist without either imagining that I would be a part of it, or would want to. This is the usual ad hominem directed at anyone who suggests the desirability of an aristocratic polity. William F. Buckley famously remarked that "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." I disagree: I want to be governed by extraordinary rather than ordinary people, though I admit that I am not one of them. There are certain values and outlooks that improve a ruling class even if they'll never be common in the general population.

We may not want to enlist the Harvard faculty, but we can enlist people who are much likelier to have fancy liberal educations: people who didn't go to college to learn to program computers or sell insurance, but people who went to college for the real reasons colleges exist. It would help if our aristocrats got around, learned foreign languages, and saw the world. It would also help if they had ties to similarly constituted aristocrats in other countries. They should cultivate a certain aimlessness; they should take advantage of their privileges to improvise their lives. Finally, it would help if they knew how to temper self-indulgence and sensuality with good taste. Our rulers ought to be jaded enough to mock moral panics, or (since that demands too much of human weakness) at least the ones that don't involve them directly. Money is like whisky; generally speaking, the older the better. This is one reason I favor a place for aristocracy without fancying myself one.

I'm not looking for Nietzschean supermen. Strict aristocracies don't produce them, anyways; what they do produce is Charles II of Spain. I want the schlecht rather than the böse, the "bad" rather than the "evil". The böse are what we have now, the ambitious little devils polishing their résumés, keeping their noses clean, seeking their tickets to higher elected rank, backstabbing their colleagues in the process. These people are devils in human form, born to sow seeds of mischief. Left unchecked, they will quicken the pace and increase efficiency, to the direct harm of their slower neighbors with other priorities, and thus violating the Golden Rule. Would it really be so bad if the people who governed us spent most of their time catting around, dueling each other, and smoking opium? It would be as entertaining to watch them as it would be hellish to be one. Not terribly different from being a Disney starlet, as it seems to work out.

At minimum, it would put a damper on people going into politics to bother their neighbors; people who go into politics to bother their neighbors often succeed. I think they'd do less damage that way. Room for the effete, for the people who'd never make it on their own, is what I'm aiming for.
 * I at least am happy to vote it up. Douthat is occasionally capable of insight. Smerdis of Tlön, wekʷōm teḱs. 03:44, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
 * (EC) Yeah, sorry, meant to put it in Clogs. I posted it before history class, so I wasn't paying particularly close attention. RoninMacbeth (talk) 03:47, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
 * But I can see it being in Blogs, so I guess we can keep it. RoninMacbeth (talk) 03:51, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

rape jokes are the problem
not "narcing" someone for making them. using freedom of speech as an excuse to be an asshole is saying "the most redeemable thing I can say about my opinions is that it's not technically illegal to say it".24.120.253.250 (talk) 22:09, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, that guy isn't a nobody, he is a celebrity, who lives off his opinion being sold to lots of people. The fact that he has to watch what he posts even on his private profiles is part of the cost of being famous. If that story was about a random truck driver that got fired after a misplaced joke on his 70 friends Facebook account, then I'd agree it has gone too far.152.250.151.20 (talk) 19:07, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, he should be well aware that being edgy comes with a price especially in public. He is a public figure now. 20:15, 25 December 2018 (UTC)