SA main point today was the "slippery slope fallacy". To summarize, everything continues on a trajectory, until it doesn't, due to being acted upon. His claim is that slippery slope has no useful predictive power. He relates it to the "if you give an inch" saying that implies people will always demand more if you keep giving more.
Although not explicitly stated, my take is that these phrases lack predictive power because one could decide not to give another inch, or one could decide where the bottom of a slope will be.
What I synthesized is that a well-functioning system constantly manifests errors, but has within the structure error-correction.
My first thought is how DNA is constantly damaged, but has multiple strategies to protect the body. First, damage repair is attempted on the DNA. If that fails, a signal to cease replication is sent. Finally, apoptosis (self-destruction) is ordered.
A well-functioning institution will still frequently produce errors, and those errors have to either be corrected, contained, or eliminated; else, malignant terminal cancer.
SA takes the white pill with faith that the US political structure is robust, and points to more tumultuous times in the recent past that it has endured.
Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
"Long march through the institutions
The long march through the institutions is a slogan coined by socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke around 1967 to describe his strategy to create radical change in government by becoming part of it. The phrase "long march" is a reference to the physical Long March of the Chinese communist army."
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The only way
cancer bad ideas persist is through a process of mutation (change to the underlying form) and metastastasis (spread through body of institutions).
Marxism was so thoroughly discredited that it required tweaks in defining who the good guys and the bad guys were, to survive in flourishing free-market societies. The only remaining Marxists accept that everyone would be much worse off, but that is preferable so long as everyone is equal (which is delusional).
The neo-Marxists extend the theory that workers are the exploited and that owners of the means of production are the exploiters by proclaiming that any person or group holding an advantage does so at the expense of people and groups that have achieved less. The good guys in this framework end up not being the workers or the owners, but the robbers, thieves, and unproductive among us. The more miserable a person is, the more esteem they receive. Obviously, this provides the incentive to
appear to be as miserable as possible. Not only are the categories of misery arbitrary, but they are corrupted by an incentive structure that encourages membership by deceit.
Is intersectionality the last mutation of Marxism before petering out, or are there sufficiently numerous other mutations capable to metastasize? Any guesses on what the neo-neo-marxism might be?
Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
This thread is in danger of it becoming a dumping ground for my stream of consciousness
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That's the entire point of this thread, but some mistakenly think the point is to form consensus on certain topics, such as fringe notions of justice, and claim anyone not adopting the BSC definition are bad actors.