In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.
What the IRS did was to punish people for speaking.
Punishing people for speaking is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Virtually every law against anything is a declaration to the effect of "if you do this, you will be punished"; so if you can legally be punished for doing something, it is effectively illegal to do it.
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying.
You might already know this and just not be mentioning the name, but that is called the just-world hypothesis.
I'm in favor of people learning how to drive before they do so, and of testing programs that certify that you do in fact know how to drive safely, and I'm fine with such certifications being used as defensive evidence if someone thought you were driving dangerously and charged you with such. You can show them that you've passed this test that shows you are able to do things like whatever you did safely. Not that that should make it an open-and-shut case, but it's good evidence. "It's ok, I know what I'm doing." Absence of such certification could likewise count against someone: change it from a mere one-time error of judgement to recklessly engaging in activities you have no competence in. But again, the absence of certification wouldn't make it open-and-shut, it's just a piece of evidence, and other factors can outweigh it.
What I'm against is punishing someone who was, despite such certification, operating a vehicle in a safe manner anyway. That is what makes it a license and not just a certification: you're not allowed to (meaning you will be punished if you) do something, even if you do it safely, without someone's prior permission. Note well that requiring licensing doesn't actually preemptively stop people from driving without a license, it just punishes people who do; and it punishes them whether or not they were actually driving unsafely. The ones who were driving unsafely would have been rightly punished anyway even if they did have a license. So the mandate of licensure does nothing but punish those who were driving safely without permission.
If ever you can be legally punished not because you did something that hurt or even endangered someone, but simply because you didn't ask permission first, liberty has one foot already in the grave.
If someone with a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody anyway despite their license, they get rightly punished for it anyway.
If somebody with a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they don't get in trouble for anything, as they shouldn't.
If somebody without a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody, they get rightly punished for it too.
But if somebody without a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they get punished, not for causing any harm or danger, but for having the gall not to ask permission before safely and harmlessly doing something.
The only difference mandatory licensure ever makes is punishing people who wouldn't have been punished otherwise because they weren't doing anything harmful or dangerous. Mandatory licensure, of anything, only ever harms innocents, by punishing them for harmless behavior that they simply didn't ask permission for first.
Or the clothing ad (forget which company, possibly late '90s or early 2000s) with a young lady opining that "I want to be different, just like everybody else."
Depressingly many instances of communication are effectively just disguised commerials for something or other. People say things to manipulate others into doing something for the speaker's own benefit all the time.
'Until they fail to meet their requirements' would mean 'immediately', as the requirements begin unmet; and if you mean they'd declare a deadline for meeting their requirements, that'd just be letting them set their own term limits. "I promise to [fix all problems] over the next 50 years!" and bam, president-for-life.
Yes, this! The way I like to phrase it is that "life is self-productive machinery", where "productivity" is defined as a property of mechanical work such that that work decreases the entropy of the system it acts upon. Life is then any physical system that transforms some kind of energy flow through it (i.e. is a machine, does work) in a way that causes its internal entropy to decrease (necessarily at the expense of increasing the entropy of the environment). The operating conditions of such a machine are the conditions in which such life can live.
By this definition, all traditional (DNA-based) living things are alive, but viruses are not (despite reproducing), fire is not (despite consuming energy and reproducing), crystals are not (despite reproducing and reducing their internal entropy — because they are not doing the work that reduces their entropy, they don't consume energy to do that, they have to have energy removed from them and then that just happens spontaneously), and perhaps most interestingly, computers are: the processing and storing of information is a reduction of their internal entropy, and they are machines that consume energy to accomplish this. A computer that built other computers that built other computers (etc) would undeniably be artificial life... but then if we add "reproduces" to the requirements, as you say, mules are out, and we definitely want them in, more so I think than we want non-reproducing computers out.
Those internet age demographics you link seem to claim that absolutely nobody on the internet is under the age of 15, which makes me somewhat doubtful about the accuracy of the rest of the breakdown.
A republic is not synonymous with representative democracy. Democracy and republicanism are orthogonal concepts; they're akin to the ownership and administration of a business. Democracy is about the state being administered, controlled by, the people, be it directly or indirectly by representatives. Republicanism is about the state being owned by, operating on behalf of and in the name of, the people. It's possible to have one and not the other, or both, or neither.
A great example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a representative democracy because it is administered by ordinary citizens representing other ordinary citizens, but it's not a republic because that government does is not directing the official sovereign power of The People, delegated to it; it is directing the power of The Crown, which power is officially delegated to said Crown by God. An opposite example would be North Korea, which is a republic in that the state officially belongs to and act on behalf of and in the name of The People, but is not democratic because that power is administered solely by the Kim family and their lackeys.
The US is both a (representative) democracy, and a republic, but those do not mean the same thing.
You're absolutely right that Marx himself, Marxism per se, is all about the economics; that's why there's the adjective "cultural" marking this as a different thing, and why I described it as applying a "Marxist paradigm" to a different subject matter than Marx himself did; specifically, the paradigm of class conflict and class consciousness. I'm still not defending the concept here mind you, just elucidating what I've seen other people use, but to that end, a frequent example I see of a movement accused of "cultural Marxism" is modern feminism: the accusation is that rather than being subsumed as a special case of liberalism and egalitarianism, arguing only that no individual woman should be specially excepted from the same rules and standards that apply to all individual men, modern feminism instead constructs women as a class as being oppressed by men as a class ("Patriarchy"), and positions itself as the advocate for the former side in that class conflict.
Who the supposed upper and lower classes are supposed to be in each such supposed class conflict looks pretty obvious to me (and I listed a bunch of examples before), but as for how exactly the upper class is supposed to be oppressing or exploiting the lower class in each of those conflicts, you'd have to ask someone concerned with that particular conflict. In any case it's generally not the strict economic exploitation of literal Marxism, between owners and workers, as it's not literal Marxism, but rather (supposedly) the application of some Marxist paradigms to other subjects besides economics.
No I thought it was like vampires where first they have to drain your dick and then you have to drink from theirs to be converted to a gay.
That's why I'm only bisexual. I sucked his dick but he didn't suck mine, and I've since only sucked the dicks of guys who hadn't sucked mine, or had my dick sucked by guys who I hadn't sucked, so I remain perpetually on the verge between the straight world and the gay. I'm like Gay Blade.
Something like that yes, though I don't especially like the way that they break the axes down into "social" and "economic". As many libertarians are fond of criticizing of such a division, freedom is freedom, and limiting what people are allowed to do economically also limits what they're allowed to do socially, and vice versa. That chart's "libertarian left" isn't actually libertarian if it only favors social liberty but then also favors authoritarian intervention in economic matters.
The axes of my spectrum are not economic and social liberty vs authority; rather, they are libertarianism and egalitarianism. Those on the left think that everyone is, or should be treated as, equal; some of them favor using authority to enforce that equality, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. Those on the right think that some people are naturally superior to others, or deserve more than others, with a zillion different ideas on the basis of that stratification (wealth, race, nationality, sex, religion, whatever); some of them favor using authority to enforce that stratification, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. And both kinds of libertarian construct their notions of "proper liberty" such that if ensured it would (by their reckoning at least) result in the egalitarian or stratified result they expect/desire, or at least expect that result (and convince themselves it's desirable) because they reckon it would be the outcome of ensuring "proper liberty" as they conceive of it.
That other way of constructing the chart is actively ignoring the "upper left" corner of my spectrum, as happens all too often (and is part of what I'm complaining about here). The "upper left" of my chart is filled with libertarian socialists, an ideology almost completely unheard-of in America: the idea that the claim right to private property is what ruins the egalitarianism of libertarianism, and that what is known to Americans as anarcho-capitalism, minus the private property (but not plus a state to own that property; everything is simply unowned, and nobody has any claim to anything that would legitimize the use of force to deter others from making equal use of it), would yield a socialist form of libertarianism. (And in their terminology, "anarchism" simpliciter is a synonym with "libertarian socialism", in contrast to the authoritarian socialism of communism; and to them "anarcho-capitalism" is a contradiction in terms). The "libertarian left" of that other chart would be center left of my chart: those who favor a moderate exercise of authority only as necessary to ensure equality but no more. And Hitler would be, rather than bottom-center as on their chart, in the far lower right of my chart; not only was he heavily authoritarian, but also clearly believed in a stratification of society on the basis of race, religion, sex, orientation, etc. I'm not sure who they think was more right-authoritarian than Hitler.
Mind you I'm not an advocate of that upper-left corner of anarcho-socialism; I just think it's an important part of the political spectrum that's too often ignored as a possibility. We are so entrenched in the concept of private property that we only think about whether individuals should have the liberty to control some of it each themselves, or the state should have the authority to control it all, or what the balance between those should be; we forget that there is a whole school of thought that thinks we should abolish the concept entirely as antithetical to both liberty and equality. Again, not that I think that that's a good idea as such, but remembering that it's a possibility opens up room for thought. I place myself somewhere top-center on my own chart; between the anarcho-socialists and the anarcho-capitalists. I'm not able to place myself on that other chart because it's missing a whole corner of the spectrum (and has instead filled in an extraneous corner opposite it which I'm not rightly able to imagine the occupants of).
"Republic" does not mean "representative democracy". "Republic" means almost nothing besides "not a monarchy": any state which acts in the authority of "the People" rather than, say, "the Crown", is a republic. A republic could be a direct democracy; ancient Athens was. A non-republic could also be a representative democracy; modern Britain is. A republic can also be a representative democracy: America is and always has been. A republic doesn't have to be democratic at all; North Korea isn't.
You're right that the two major American political parties lean toward the very same extreme (and the other extremes are almost entirely unrepresented in this country), but to say they're "clustered very tightly" around any extreme is a bit parochial. There are depths of extremeness even our worst politicians have only begun to plumb.
I like to conceive of a political spectrum with four extremes: anarcho-socialists in one corner (let's call it upper-left), anarcho-capitalists in another corner (upper-right), "egalitarian" authoritarians like Stalin and Mao in another (lower-left) corner, and anti-egalitarian authoritarians like Hitler and Mussolini in the last (lower-right) corner.
The two major American political parties are both somewhere around the middle, both drifting toward the lower-right, both very near each other, but Republicans a bit further from center, but both with quite a ways to go before we start gassing Jews and invading Mexico for lebensraum. There are vocal pulls in subsets of the populace (with no real representation) toward the upper-right and the center-left. The lower-left exists as little more than a boogeyman these days, and the upper-left seems to be our national blind spot that nobody even realizes exists.
Not to defend (nor disparage) the concept, but since none of the other responses are actually answering your question:
"Cultural Marxism" is the application of the Marxist class consciousness paradigm to cultural classes rather than the material economic classes that Marx himself was concerned with. With straight white cisgender males (etc) as the "bourgeoisie", and gay people, people of color, trans people, women, etc, collectively as the "proletariate". Or rather with a privileged and underprivileged class along each of those axes (straight vs gay, white vs colored, cis vs trans, men vs women, etc), with many intersections between the different axes.
I'm not sure where you misunderstand me exactly, but you're saying things that I agree with apparently in an attempted rebuttal, so I guess I wasn't clear.
Pride and shame are the negations of each other's de Morgan duals. De Morgan duality is the relation that holds between concepts like conjunction and negation, necessity and possibility, and most relevant here, obligation and permission.
X is obligatory if and only if not-X is not permissible. X is not obligatory if and only if not-X is permissible. X is permissible if and only if not-X is not obligatory. X is not permissible if and only if not-X is obligatory.
To be proud to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "obligatory": it's some way that you ought to be. It's better to be that way than not. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, shameful. (e.g. I'm proud to be intelligent. It's better to be intelligent than not, and if I were not, I would be comparatively ashamed of that).
To be simply not proud of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not obligatory": it's not some way that you especially ought to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially ashamed of either. (e.g. I'm not proud of my skin, hair, or eye color. There's nothing especially better about them than other ways they might be. There's nothing especially worse about them either, though; although if they were worse, I would still be not-proud, but I would also be ashamed).
To be simply unashamed of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "permissible": it's not some way that you especially ought not to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially proud of either. (e.g. I'm not ashamed of my sexual orientation. There's nothing especially worse about it than other ways it might be. There's nothing especially better about it either, though; although if it were better, I would still be not-ashamed, but I would also be proud).
To be ashamed to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not permissible"; it's some way that you ought to not be. It's better not to be that way. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, something to be proud of. (e.g. I'm ashamed of being out of shape. It's worse to be out of shape than in shape, and if I were in shape, I would be comparatively proud of that).
Thank you for the compliment about maturity. Reflecting on it made me realize something: even before I started to think of myself as maybe below average due to my prolonged post-collegiate failures, I was noticing something that I admired in the people "less smart" than me, something that I just now realized, in retrospect, was the very skill I had to learn to begin to overcome those failures. I usually didn't really study for my classes, I just listened in lecture and sometimes did the reading, and somehow absorbed the material, which was easy for me. I didn't really understand what "studying" involved, how to even do it if I needed to do it. Either something made sense to me, and then it was easy and I was good at it, or it didn't make sense to me, and I didn't even know where to begin trying to make sense of it, it was intractably hard and I was terrible at it so I gave up and did something else that made more sense. But I saw fellow classmates to whom nothing we were studying made initial sense, but they somehow... did something, I wasn't sure what... and came out the other end of it having some competency at a thing that they didn't just "grok". I found that impressive because it looked really really hard and unpleasant and I was really glad that I didn't have to do it to succeed... in school.
After school, I eventually found myself at a place in life where every single option to move forward in life was something that didn't just make initial sense to me. Everything was something hard that I sucked at and I didn't even know where to begin trying. It took years but I eventually figured out how to tackle problems-I-don't-know-how-to-tackle. I'm still not sure how to put in words what exactly it is that I learned, and that's frustrating to realize. I'm still absolutely terrified to be put in a position where I'm responsible for doing something I don't already know how to do thoroughly, but somehow I'm now able to "fake it till I make it", to just start doing something, even if it might not be the right thing, and then rely on feedback from that process to refine what I do, until eventually I do know what I'm doing. But it still scares the shit out of me; I just feel like screaming "I don't know how to do this! Don't rely on me, I have no idea what I'm doing!" except I have to be someone people can rely on or else I'm useless to anyone, and as success in adult life hinges entirely upon being useful to other people, I have to keep my mouth shut and just figure it out anyway.
I wonder if that's related to the D-K effect at all; I am acutely aware of exactly what I don't know, and I know I wouldn't want to rely on someone with that dearth of knowledge to do this, so I feel like I shouldn't allow anyone else to rely on me, except I have to, both to survive and to ever have any opportunity to become more reliable. (As a side-effect, I'm also now realizing how many supposed experts I rely on, from construction people to auto mechanics to even doctors, are all just as unreliable at their jobs as I am at my job, and that's kind of frightening and at times infuriating, when the whole reason I'm paying someone to do something is because they're supposed to be better at it than me, but a not-even-amateur like me can still find faults in their work, faults which they acknowledge once pointed out, but wouldn't have spotted without me).
Anyway, good point about relational ability being important to success as well. I would say that I do actually have a low intrinsic need for relationships —I'm generally very happy being alone, and try to structure my life in a way that I'm not in anyone else's business and they're not in mine —but when I set my mind to it I do seem to have high relational ability. When I first went off to college, after doing independent study throughout high school and consequently not having much social contact at all, that in turn after being the unpopular weird nerd throughout elementary school, I decided that I was going to make a concerted effort to h
In Old English and its predecessors "apple" and its cognates just meant "fruit" of any kind. So at some stage of translation, it would have literally said "apple", because that was the word for "fruit" at the time. Then the word "apple" came to mean apples specifically, and that carried meaning into the Christian mythology that wasn't there originally.
as a cisgender (god I hate that this term even exists)
Do you also hate that the word "heterosexual" exists? What would you use as the antonym for "homosexual" without it? What would you use as the antonym for "transgender" without "cisgender"?
No matter what you think about any of these categories, having the terminology to name them is, if nothing else, useful.
Would you rather we not have an antonym of "woman" either, since being a straight cis male is "normal" and only deviations therefrom need specifying? (In that case, that's sort of what actually happened in language. "Man", etymologically, means "human", without sex specified. "Wom" and "wer" were the old English sex-specifying prefixes for females and males respectively. If language had evolved without sexism, we'd speak of "women" and "wermen" today, instead of "women" and "men"-you-know-the-normal-kind-without-a-womb).
Pride can be taken in things that are mere attributes and not accomplishments. If someone was born smarter, stronger, or in various ways more capable than other people, that would not only tend to make them accomplish things they could be proud of, but that innate capability could itself be a source of pride.
You are correct that pride is not just the negation of shame, however. To be proud is more than just not to be ashamed. You can be unashamed of something without being proud of it. I'm not ashamed of my skin or eye or hair color, but neither am I proud of any of them.
Slashdot Mirror
In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.
What the IRS did was to punish people for speaking.
Punishing people for speaking is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Virtually every law against anything is a declaration to the effect of "if you do this, you will be punished"; so if you can legally be punished for doing something, it is effectively illegal to do it.
I like your point, but seriously... "copyright", "copyrited", AND "copywrite" all in one post?
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying.
You might already know this and just not be mentioning the name, but that is called the just-world hypothesis.
I'm in favor of people learning how to drive before they do so, and of testing programs that certify that you do in fact know how to drive safely, and I'm fine with such certifications being used as defensive evidence if someone thought you were driving dangerously and charged you with such. You can show them that you've passed this test that shows you are able to do things like whatever you did safely. Not that that should make it an open-and-shut case, but it's good evidence. "It's ok, I know what I'm doing." Absence of such certification could likewise count against someone: change it from a mere one-time error of judgement to recklessly engaging in activities you have no competence in. But again, the absence of certification wouldn't make it open-and-shut, it's just a piece of evidence, and other factors can outweigh it.
What I'm against is punishing someone who was, despite such certification, operating a vehicle in a safe manner anyway. That is what makes it a license and not just a certification: you're not allowed to (meaning you will be punished if you) do something, even if you do it safely, without someone's prior permission. Note well that requiring licensing doesn't actually preemptively stop people from driving without a license, it just punishes people who do; and it punishes them whether or not they were actually driving unsafely. The ones who were driving unsafely would have been rightly punished anyway even if they did have a license. So the mandate of licensure does nothing but punish those who were driving safely without permission.
If ever you can be legally punished not because you did something that hurt or even endangered someone, but simply because you didn't ask permission first, liberty has one foot already in the grave.
If someone with a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody anyway despite their license, they get rightly punished for it anyway.
If somebody with a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they don't get in trouble for anything, as they shouldn't.
If somebody without a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody, they get rightly punished for it too.
But if somebody without a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they get punished, not for causing any harm or danger, but for having the gall not to ask permission before safely and harmlessly doing something.
The only difference mandatory licensure ever makes is punishing people who wouldn't have been punished otherwise because they weren't doing anything harmful or dangerous. Mandatory licensure, of anything, only ever harms innocents, by punishing them for harmless behavior that they simply didn't ask permission for first.
Or the clothing ad (forget which company, possibly late '90s or early 2000s) with a young lady opining that "I want to be different, just like everybody else."
Depressingly many instances of communication are effectively just disguised commerials for something or other. People say things to manipulate others into doing something for the speaker's own benefit all the time.
Political science is not the same thing as politics. You're discussing the latter, not the former.
'Until they fail to meet their requirements' would mean 'immediately', as the requirements begin unmet; and if you mean they'd declare a deadline for meeting their requirements, that'd just be letting them set their own term limits. "I promise to [fix all problems] over the next 50 years!" and bam, president-for-life.
Yes, this! The way I like to phrase it is that "life is self-productive machinery", where "productivity" is defined as a property of mechanical work such that that work decreases the entropy of the system it acts upon. Life is then any physical system that transforms some kind of energy flow through it (i.e. is a machine, does work) in a way that causes its internal entropy to decrease (necessarily at the expense of increasing the entropy of the environment). The operating conditions of such a machine are the conditions in which such life can live.
By this definition, all traditional (DNA-based) living things are alive, but viruses are not (despite reproducing), fire is not (despite consuming energy and reproducing), crystals are not (despite reproducing and reducing their internal entropy — because they are not doing the work that reduces their entropy, they don't consume energy to do that, they have to have energy removed from them and then that just happens spontaneously), and perhaps most interestingly, computers are: the processing and storing of information is a reduction of their internal entropy, and they are machines that consume energy to accomplish this. A computer that built other computers that built other computers (etc) would undeniably be artificial life... but then if we add "reproduces" to the requirements, as you say, mules are out, and we definitely want them in, more so I think than we want non-reproducing computers out.
Those internet age demographics you link seem to claim that absolutely nobody on the internet is under the age of 15, which makes me somewhat doubtful about the accuracy of the rest of the breakdown.
Que? Cómo "que" una broma? Quiso decir "queue"? O "más probablemente "cue"?
A republic is not synonymous with representative democracy. Democracy and republicanism are orthogonal concepts; they're akin to the ownership and administration of a business. Democracy is about the state being administered, controlled by, the people, be it directly or indirectly by representatives. Republicanism is about the state being owned by, operating on behalf of and in the name of, the people. It's possible to have one and not the other, or both, or neither.
A great example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a representative democracy because it is administered by ordinary citizens representing other ordinary citizens, but it's not a republic because that government does is not directing the official sovereign power of The People, delegated to it; it is directing the power of The Crown, which power is officially delegated to said Crown by God. An opposite example would be North Korea, which is a republic in that the state officially belongs to and act on behalf of and in the name of The People, but is not democratic because that power is administered solely by the Kim family and their lackeys.
The US is both a (representative) democracy, and a republic, but those do not mean the same thing.
You're absolutely right that Marx himself, Marxism per se, is all about the economics; that's why there's the adjective "cultural" marking this as a different thing, and why I described it as applying a "Marxist paradigm" to a different subject matter than Marx himself did; specifically, the paradigm of class conflict and class consciousness. I'm still not defending the concept here mind you, just elucidating what I've seen other people use, but to that end, a frequent example I see of a movement accused of "cultural Marxism" is modern feminism: the accusation is that rather than being subsumed as a special case of liberalism and egalitarianism, arguing only that no individual woman should be specially excepted from the same rules and standards that apply to all individual men, modern feminism instead constructs women as a class as being oppressed by men as a class ("Patriarchy"), and positions itself as the advocate for the former side in that class conflict.
Who the supposed upper and lower classes are supposed to be in each such supposed class conflict looks pretty obvious to me (and I listed a bunch of examples before), but as for how exactly the upper class is supposed to be oppressing or exploiting the lower class in each of those conflicts, you'd have to ask someone concerned with that particular conflict. In any case it's generally not the strict economic exploitation of literal Marxism, between owners and workers, as it's not literal Marxism, but rather (supposedly) the application of some Marxist paradigms to other subjects besides economics.
No I thought it was like vampires where first they have to drain your dick and then you have to drink from theirs to be converted to a gay.
That's why I'm only bisexual. I sucked his dick but he didn't suck mine, and I've since only sucked the dicks of guys who hadn't sucked mine, or had my dick sucked by guys who I hadn't sucked, so I remain perpetually on the verge between the straight world and the gay. I'm like Gay Blade.
Something like that yes, though I don't especially like the way that they break the axes down into "social" and "economic". As many libertarians are fond of criticizing of such a division, freedom is freedom, and limiting what people are allowed to do economically also limits what they're allowed to do socially, and vice versa. That chart's "libertarian left" isn't actually libertarian if it only favors social liberty but then also favors authoritarian intervention in economic matters.
The axes of my spectrum are not economic and social liberty vs authority; rather, they are libertarianism and egalitarianism. Those on the left think that everyone is, or should be treated as, equal; some of them favor using authority to enforce that equality, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. Those on the right think that some people are naturally superior to others, or deserve more than others, with a zillion different ideas on the basis of that stratification (wealth, race, nationality, sex, religion, whatever); some of them favor using authority to enforce that stratification, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. And both kinds of libertarian construct their notions of "proper liberty" such that if ensured it would (by their reckoning at least) result in the egalitarian or stratified result they expect/desire, or at least expect that result (and convince themselves it's desirable) because they reckon it would be the outcome of ensuring "proper liberty" as they conceive of it.
That other way of constructing the chart is actively ignoring the "upper left" corner of my spectrum, as happens all too often (and is part of what I'm complaining about here). The "upper left" of my chart is filled with libertarian socialists, an ideology almost completely unheard-of in America: the idea that the claim right to private property is what ruins the egalitarianism of libertarianism, and that what is known to Americans as anarcho-capitalism, minus the private property (but not plus a state to own that property; everything is simply unowned, and nobody has any claim to anything that would legitimize the use of force to deter others from making equal use of it), would yield a socialist form of libertarianism. (And in their terminology, "anarchism" simpliciter is a synonym with "libertarian socialism", in contrast to the authoritarian socialism of communism; and to them "anarcho-capitalism" is a contradiction in terms). The "libertarian left" of that other chart would be center left of my chart: those who favor a moderate exercise of authority only as necessary to ensure equality but no more. And Hitler would be, rather than bottom-center as on their chart, in the far lower right of my chart; not only was he heavily authoritarian, but also clearly believed in a stratification of society on the basis of race, religion, sex, orientation, etc. I'm not sure who they think was more right-authoritarian than Hitler.
Mind you I'm not an advocate of that upper-left corner of anarcho-socialism; I just think it's an important part of the political spectrum that's too often ignored as a possibility. We are so entrenched in the concept of private property that we only think about whether individuals should have the liberty to control some of it each themselves, or the state should have the authority to control it all, or what the balance between those should be; we forget that there is a whole school of thought that thinks we should abolish the concept entirely as antithetical to both liberty and equality. Again, not that I think that that's a good idea as such, but remembering that it's a possibility opens up room for thought. I place myself somewhere top-center on my own chart; between the anarcho-socialists and the anarcho-capitalists. I'm not able to place myself on that other chart because it's missing a whole corner of the spectrum (and has instead filled in an extraneous corner opposite it which I'm not rightly able to imagine the occupants of).
F
"Republic" does not mean "representative democracy". "Republic" means almost nothing besides "not a monarchy": any state which acts in the authority of "the People" rather than, say, "the Crown", is a republic. A republic could be a direct democracy; ancient Athens was. A non-republic could also be a representative democracy; modern Britain is. A republic can also be a representative democracy: America is and always has been. A republic doesn't have to be democratic at all; North Korea isn't.
You're right that the two major American political parties lean toward the very same extreme (and the other extremes are almost entirely unrepresented in this country), but to say they're "clustered very tightly" around any extreme is a bit parochial. There are depths of extremeness even our worst politicians have only begun to plumb.
I like to conceive of a political spectrum with four extremes: anarcho-socialists in one corner (let's call it upper-left), anarcho-capitalists in another corner (upper-right), "egalitarian" authoritarians like Stalin and Mao in another (lower-left) corner, and anti-egalitarian authoritarians like Hitler and Mussolini in the last (lower-right) corner.
The two major American political parties are both somewhere around the middle, both drifting toward the lower-right, both very near each other, but Republicans a bit further from center, but both with quite a ways to go before we start gassing Jews and invading Mexico for lebensraum. There are vocal pulls in subsets of the populace (with no real representation) toward the upper-right and the center-left. The lower-left exists as little more than a boogeyman these days, and the upper-left seems to be our national blind spot that nobody even realizes exists.
Not to defend (nor disparage) the concept, but since none of the other responses are actually answering your question:
"Cultural Marxism" is the application of the Marxist class consciousness paradigm to cultural classes rather than the material economic classes that Marx himself was concerned with. With straight white cisgender males (etc) as the "bourgeoisie", and gay people, people of color, trans people, women, etc, collectively as the "proletariate". Or rather with a privileged and underprivileged class along each of those axes (straight vs gay, white vs colored, cis vs trans, men vs women, etc), with many intersections between the different axes.
I'm not sure where you misunderstand me exactly, but you're saying things that I agree with apparently in an attempted rebuttal, so I guess I wasn't clear.
Pride and shame are the negations of each other's de Morgan duals. De Morgan duality is the relation that holds between concepts like conjunction and negation, necessity and possibility, and most relevant here, obligation and permission.
X is obligatory if and only if not-X is not permissible.
X is not obligatory if and only if not-X is permissible.
X is permissible if and only if not-X is not obligatory.
X is not permissible if and only if not-X is obligatory.
To be proud to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "obligatory": it's some way that you ought to be. It's better to be that way than not. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, shameful. (e.g. I'm proud to be intelligent. It's better to be intelligent than not, and if I were not, I would be comparatively ashamed of that).
To be simply not proud of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not obligatory": it's not some way that you especially ought to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially ashamed of either. (e.g. I'm not proud of my skin, hair, or eye color. There's nothing especially better about them than other ways they might be. There's nothing especially worse about them either, though; although if they were worse, I would still be not-proud, but I would also be ashamed).
To be simply unashamed of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "permissible": it's not some way that you especially ought not to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially proud of either. (e.g. I'm not ashamed of my sexual orientation. There's nothing especially worse about it than other ways it might be. There's nothing especially better about it either, though; although if it were better, I would still be not-ashamed, but I would also be proud).
To be ashamed to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not permissible"; it's some way that you ought to not be. It's better not to be that way. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, something to be proud of. (e.g. I'm ashamed of being out of shape. It's worse to be out of shape than in shape, and if I were in shape, I would be comparatively proud of that).
Thank you for the compliment about maturity. Reflecting on it made me realize something: even before I started to think of myself as maybe below average due to my prolonged post-collegiate failures, I was noticing something that I admired in the people "less smart" than me, something that I just now realized, in retrospect, was the very skill I had to learn to begin to overcome those failures. I usually didn't really study for my classes, I just listened in lecture and sometimes did the reading, and somehow absorbed the material, which was easy for me. I didn't really understand what "studying" involved, how to even do it if I needed to do it. Either something made sense to me, and then it was easy and I was good at it, or it didn't make sense to me, and I didn't even know where to begin trying to make sense of it, it was intractably hard and I was terrible at it so I gave up and did something else that made more sense. But I saw fellow classmates to whom nothing we were studying made initial sense, but they somehow... did something, I wasn't sure what... and came out the other end of it having some competency at a thing that they didn't just "grok". I found that impressive because it looked really really hard and unpleasant and I was really glad that I didn't have to do it to succeed... in school.
After school, I eventually found myself at a place in life where every single option to move forward in life was something that didn't just make initial sense to me. Everything was something hard that I sucked at and I didn't even know where to begin trying. It took years but I eventually figured out how to tackle problems-I-don't-know-how-to-tackle. I'm still not sure how to put in words what exactly it is that I learned, and that's frustrating to realize. I'm still absolutely terrified to be put in a position where I'm responsible for doing something I don't already know how to do thoroughly, but somehow I'm now able to "fake it till I make it", to just start doing something, even if it might not be the right thing, and then rely on feedback from that process to refine what I do, until eventually I do know what I'm doing. But it still scares the shit out of me; I just feel like screaming "I don't know how to do this! Don't rely on me, I have no idea what I'm doing!" except I have to be someone people can rely on or else I'm useless to anyone, and as success in adult life hinges entirely upon being useful to other people, I have to keep my mouth shut and just figure it out anyway.
I wonder if that's related to the D-K effect at all; I am acutely aware of exactly what I don't know, and I know I wouldn't want to rely on someone with that dearth of knowledge to do this, so I feel like I shouldn't allow anyone else to rely on me, except I have to, both to survive and to ever have any opportunity to become more reliable. (As a side-effect, I'm also now realizing how many supposed experts I rely on, from construction people to auto mechanics to even doctors, are all just as unreliable at their jobs as I am at my job, and that's kind of frightening and at times infuriating, when the whole reason I'm paying someone to do something is because they're supposed to be better at it than me, but a not-even-amateur like me can still find faults in their work, faults which they acknowledge once pointed out, but wouldn't have spotted without me).
Anyway, good point about relational ability being important to success as well. I would say that I do actually have a low intrinsic need for relationships —I'm generally very happy being alone, and try to structure my life in a way that I'm not in anyone else's business and they're not in mine —but when I set my mind to it I do seem to have high relational ability. When I first went off to college, after doing independent study throughout high school and consequently not having much social contact at all, that in turn after being the unpopular weird nerd throughout elementary school, I decided that I was going to make a concerted effort to h
In Old English and its predecessors "apple" and its cognates just meant "fruit" of any kind. So at some stage of translation, it would have literally said "apple", because that was the word for "fruit" at the time. Then the word "apple" came to mean apples specifically, and that carried meaning into the Christian mythology that wasn't there originally.
as a cisgender (god I hate that this term even exists)
Do you also hate that the word "heterosexual" exists? What would you use as the antonym for "homosexual" without it? What would you use as the antonym for "transgender" without "cisgender"?
No matter what you think about any of these categories, having the terminology to name them is, if nothing else, useful.
Would you rather we not have an antonym of "woman" either, since being a straight cis male is "normal" and only deviations therefrom need specifying? (In that case, that's sort of what actually happened in language. "Man", etymologically, means "human", without sex specified. "Wom" and "wer" were the old English sex-specifying prefixes for females and males respectively. If language had evolved without sexism, we'd speak of "women" and "wermen" today, instead of "women" and "men"-you-know-the-normal-kind-without-a-womb).
Pride can be taken in things that are mere attributes and not accomplishments. If someone was born smarter, stronger, or in various ways more capable than other people, that would not only tend to make them accomplish things they could be proud of, but that innate capability could itself be a source of pride.
You are correct that pride is not just the negation of shame, however. To be proud is more than just not to be ashamed. You can be unashamed of something without being proud of it. I'm not ashamed of my skin or eye or hair color, but neither am I proud of any of them.